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httos://archive.org/details/gospelfornewagebOObuch 


A GOSPEL FOR THE NEW AGE 









“~~ 
fy AS 
“A oareat se 


for the New Age 






BEING THE REALITY OF RELIGION 
AS JESUS TAUGHT IT 


a 
REV. C. MOMUGHANAN 


NASHVILLE, TENN. 
COKESBURY PRESS 
1925 


CoPpyYRIGHT, 1925 
BY 
LAMAR & BARTON 





PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


To 
REV. JOHN A. KERN, D.D. 


whose approval and personal 

aire have long been to 

me a delight and inspiration 

to highest ideals and best en- 
\ pamaee this book is 


AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED 





CONTENTS 


FOREWORD 


oo © 8 FAO 6 OP F OP a 6 eee Se DP ONO. Ee OOS UTR. Ob O73. 4 ode 


CHAPTER I 
The New World Era: An Interpretation of the Times 
yey hy | Saeiuelape pay aren © Sage Cn A NES eae een a ek Foe LC 


CHAPTER IT 
Religion: The Greatest Reality, the Foundation Principle. 


CHAPTER III 


The Cosmic Principle of Love: God’s Motive in Creation 
and Redemption 


Sst 8 sae F168 2 Cs ft eis os OP ae 2 ae Ae eV ee FF 


CHAPTER IV 


God’s World Plan as Revealed by Our Lord Jesus Christ. 


CHAPTER V 
Humanity’s Darkest Shadow 


ee She oie oS ee Oe OS SC Fs oe 8 Oe 


CHAPTER VI 
Sin: The Moral Blight of the Individual 


se 2°89 © @.6 0.68 6 © 6.8 


CHAPTER VII 
The Forgiveness of Sin: God’s Opportunity with Man... 


CHAPTER VIII 
The New Life from Above: The Hope of Humanity.... 


CHAPTER IX 
No Fixed Law in Conversion 


Ree vye eee een sees 66 ove ust 


CHAPTER X 
The Supernatural in Our Religion 


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11 


33 


57 


79 


8 A Gospel for the New Age 


CHAPTER XI Paan 

God with Us: The Reality of the Divine Presence...... 223 
CHAPTER XII 

The ithical Reign of .God=...2. 2.56 eee oe eee ee ee 255 
CHAPTER XIII 

The Morale of the Dynamic Religion................. 285 
CHAPTER XIV 

Christianity: The Ultimate: Religion: 7). 22:2 e5....2+. 313 
CHAPTER XV 

Religion: The Instinct of Immortality................ 841 
CHAPTER XVI 

Led of the Spirit: The Way of Safety................. 367 


FOREWORD 


THIS is not a volume of sermons, but the discus- 
sion of certain subjects which are as vital to the 
new-age Christianity as the very air we breathe. 

The world is already burdened with books; sure- 
ly, therefore, there should be good reasons for an- 
other. The sea of thought has rarely been so un- 
settled and troubled by currents and cross currents, 
with here and there a dangerous rock beneath the 
surface. Wild vagaries are afloat, and the light of 
truth is needed as never before. No truth is self- 
sustaining. To live it must be restated again and 
again. Then there has never been an age just like 
ours, and for that reason history stands us little in 
hand as a guide. The issues of our own times must 
be met with courage and wisdom; and this volume 
is designed to answer just that purpose. In its 
pages thereis no attempt to startle by novelty either 
in thought or expression; but the one ambition has 
been to present vital truths so that their light may 
shine out over the troubled waters and men may see 
above the fog a sparkle to warrant a fair haven. 
If this shall result, the years spent in gleaning the 
truths and the labor of preparing them for the press 
will not have been lost. With this pleasing hope 
the volume is sent forth upon its glad mission of 
service—to fall into unfriendly hands at times, but 
everywhere and always to plead the cause of re- 
ligion as our Saviour taught it, dynamic and real, 
the world’s greatest need at present. 

(9) 


10 A Gospel for the New Age 


Here let me acknowledge my very great debt of 
gratitude to certain authors for the keen pleasure 
and lasting benefit gotten from association with 
them while reading their books. When use has been 
made of their ‘‘wares,’”’ with pleasure credit has been 
given to whom due. This has been the invariable 
rule except when to do so would have burdened the 
page with trivial references. Who can trace the 
pedigree of all his thoughts? Were it possible, to 
do so would not be profitable. Our best thoughts 
have roots in what others have said; and perhaps 
our best work lies in burnishing and setting well the 
world’s nuggets of golden truth. 

Special mention should be made of Prof. T. F. 
Pierce, A.M.—late of the faculty of the University 
of Oklahoma—whose genial personality and ac- 
curate scholarship have been an inspiration, and 
whose time was freely given to proof reading the 
typewritten manuscript. To him and all others 
who have lent encouragement and aid, lasting 
gratitude is hereby expressed. C. H. BUCHANAN. 

BALTIMORE CONFERENCE. 


CHAPTER I 


THE NEW WORLD ERA: AN INTERPRETATION OF THE 
TIMES SPIRIT 


THE LURE OF THE TIMES 


IN mankind’s gloomiest hours 
Hope sings her promise anew; 

From ashes of smoldering powers 
New empires spring into view. 


The shores of the tangible real 
Are strewn with wrecks of the seen; 
Somewhere, instinctive felt, ideal, 
Eternal sweet regions remain. 


Behind us the ages are hoary, 
Night’s curtains are being unfurled; 
Before us vast sky beams of glory 
Shoot up from an unseen world! 
Gry s ay 


CHAPTER I 


THE NEW WORLD ERA: AN INTERPRETA- 
TION OF THE TIMES SPIRIT 


THE world has had its recent era of darkness, its 
deluge of destruction, its horrors of war and death. 
But that was night; now the day is at hand. The 
dawn of a new age is gilding the hilltops with the 
glory of a far-flung optimism which fills the future 
with abundant hope. God is not done with this old 
world yet; therefore he turns the gaze of men away 
from the ruin they have wrought and lets them look 
upon a more inspiring scene. Where destruction 
and death once reigned, there is now new life; where 
there was disintegration, there are now new growth 
and high hope. 

Was there ever such an age as this? That which 
every man had longed to see is now being realized— 
namely, an opportunity to act his part in the drama 
of life. On every hand there is a desire to “‘redeem 
the times,”’ an eagerness to answer the “bugle call 
of duty.” There is no need that any should stand 
idle all the day, for there is work enough for all. 


THE TASK AWAITING 


What is it that lends such a charm to the times 
and fills the morning of the new age with such zest? 
Is it not the greatness of the task to be accomplished, 
the heroism of having to reconstruct the world and 
bring order out of the present chaos and confusion? 


(13) 


14 A Gospel for the New Age 


But how shall we proceed with sucn an undertaking, 
and who can confront such a task and not feel the 
burden of it all? But how shall we build, and by 
what principles shall we be guided? One thing 
above all else is needful: there must be a solid founda- 
tion of recognized reality and established worth, 
sterling honesty and truth. Commonplace these? 
Yes; but, as Charles Wagner says, “Nothing is 
permanent but the everlasting commonplace.” 

In the task of world reconstruction we of to-day 
have a decided advantage over the builders of the 
past. We have their experience to guide us, their 
follies and failures to warn us of dangers, and their 
wisdom to steer us aright. It was a habit with 
Napoleon when he had suffered a defeat in battle 
to go back over the battle field and study the ground 
and see, if possible, what advantage his enemy may 
have had in position, so that he might never again 
fall into a like trap. The world to-day might do well 
to follow this bit of shrewd generalship. 


CAUSES OF THE WORLD’S TROUBLES 


What was it in recent history that brought the 
world to the chaotic condition which confronts us 
to-day and started the nations of earth to grappling 
at each other’s throats? ‘The causes were many, we 
well know, and a full exposé of them would tax 
our credulity and weary our patience. Yet a brief 
review is needful, for how else could we know the 
evils and avoid the dangers? 

Among the first to be mentioned was the world’s 
lack of confidence. Mutual trust between man and 
man, between peoples and nations, is the one founda- 


The New World Era 15 


tion on which all civilization, commerce, and religion 
must rest. Where this remains steadfast all else 
will be firm; but let this be lost, and all is chaos and 
confusion. When once lost it is most difficult to 
restore, and this is exactly our problem of to-day. 
The world has become very suspicious. Many 
things claim our confidence which cannot be trusted. 
Of such the world has had its fill; hence its first 
great impulse for permanency is a demand for the 
-real, as a foundation upon which to rebuild the world. 
Our latest-developed instinct is a craving for ultimate 
truths. This principle applied to our Christian 
religion has given us a new heaven and a new earth. 
With confidence fully established in the messenger, 
it is not difficult to trust in the God who inspires the 
messenger. Just now, perhaps as never before, 
the world needs a trustworthy spokesman with a 
gospel of reality. In this fact alone lies the hope of 
rebuilding the tumble-down world. It is a well- 
established fact that the one destructive force 
back of the world’s recent catastrophe was a lack 
of international confidence growing out of diplomatic 
insincerity—that serpent of evil coiled up in secret 
treaties between nations—and a desire, through 
the withholding of facts, to secure the mastery in 
world dominance. Unreality was the path down 
which the world rapidly went to ruin. It was a most 
painful fact that, when our diplomats had awakened 
the greatest world confidence in us as a nation and 
a time came to manifest a sublime and world-wide 
altruism, our statesmanship utterly failed. Words 
took the place of deeds. 


16 A Gospel for the New Age 


_ THE TOTTERING FOUNDATIONS 


It is strange how easily men were led to believe 
that the crumbling of the foundations was an evi- 
dence of progress. Well-established truths, however 
real, were discarded for new theories. Men prided 
themselves on being liberal and broad, broke away 
from their moorings, and set sail on uncertain seas 
with no trained hand to guide. Forgetting that all 
worth-while life must rest somewhere, valuable 
opinions were discarded and ‘‘creeds”’ sneered at. 
There is nothing novel in the fact that many per- 
sons are opposed to any vital religious truth. Since 
the days of St. Paul the words of Christ have been 
foolishness to some and a stumblingblock to others. 
But the most alarming symptoms came to view when 
many of the orthodox members of some evangelical 
Churches took it up, and when dignified magazines 
voiced the same sentiment. Here and there a sensa- 
tional preacher sprang up and traduced the Church 
which gave him his bread and slandered the blessed 
Lord who redeemed him. “The president of a 
well-known college,’ says Charles Jefferson, ‘‘be- 
gan a book with the assertion that the ‘current 
creed of Christianity is a chaos of contradictions.’”’ 
And to-day some of the most vital teachings of 
Christianity are wiped from the pages of public 
opinion. Yet the most heroic and triumphant days 
in the history of the Church were times when her 
devotees felt her doctrines stood for something and 
her mighty men died for the truth they taught. 
Thus it was that we have a Bible and a gospel and a 
Church to-day. But a man to do this must have 


The New World Era ty 


something to live for, some facts as starting points, 
and some principles as a polestar to be guided by. 
The breaking away from the long-established 
standards of social obligations was the most alarm- 
ing of all the tendencies in the last two decades. 
In well-nigh all countries of which history speaks 
mankind seemed possessed by some evil genius, 
and drifted rapidly into disregard of all discipline 
and healthful regard of law. Individuals set up 
their own authority against long-standing custom 
and tried laws. Parents seemed no longer to care to 
control their own children, and old-time family 
government has well-nigh disappeared from the 
face of the earth. Students in the schools and col- 
leges followed in the same path, and “student con- 
trol”’ became the style of the day. Mobs in the street 
defied police control, labor unions ruled in the wage 
market, while ‘‘big business’? and commercial greed 
dominated legislative halls. Thus the world passed 
into a “dark and uncertain nebulous belt’? when 
none saw whither it went. In politics and society, 
as well as in the home, the “age of revolution” was 
felt. Ancient landmarks were removed and vener- 
able sanctions destroyed. Sacred authority and the 
call of Christ were challenged. The sanctity of the 
home and the marital vow came to be regarded as 
of little consequence. Divorce, like the breath of 
Satan, hissed in society. Children came to lose 
respect for parents, denying their wisdom and defying 
their authority. The charm and purity of country 
life were forgotten in the rush for the sensuous glare 
and lure of the city with its noisy streets and crowded 
“tenement flats.” Those who were not taught in 


2 


18 A Gospel for ihe New Age 


childhood to regard parental authority in the home 
went forth as men and women without respect for 
State and national laws to become self-willed, per- 
verse, and insubordinate citizens, to swell the crim- 
inal classes and crowd prison cells. It did not re- 
quire the vision of a prophet of old to see what all 
this foreshadowed. 

Nor is this the full story of the wave of folly that 
went on just prior to the outbreak of the Great War. 
Across the seas, perhaps more than in our home- 
land, the disintegration was felt. An eminent 
English divine reported conditions in his country 
thus: “The most deadly menace to our English 
life is found in the stream of prurient literature 
flowing from the press—much of it written by wom- 
en! It apologizes for adultery, for the seducer, 
and for the harlot. It incites to lust and passion 
by investing them with a glamour they do not 
possess. It poisons the mind against the restraints 
of the marriage vow, and makes love and home 
life the butt of its ridicule. This is what it has come 
to by those who would emancipate themselves from 
the authority of the Bible.’”’! They have no sovereign 
but their own wills and passions. In any land las- 
civious writers may disguise their propaganda with 
all possible grace of style, but what they call ‘‘liber- 
ty”’ is in reality licentiousness and moral rottenness. 
Nor is it surprising that there should be an attempt 
to dignify such a cult by pushing it into favor among 
cultured people. A generation who were without 
family restraint as they grew up would, from the very 


1“The Gospel of Sovereignty,” by J. D. Jones, p. 123. 
(George H. Doran Co.) 


The New World Era 19 


habit of self-indulgence, likely produce that class of 
young writers who present the ‘‘Freudian point of 
view,”’ which holds that ‘‘the trouble with American 
life, at the root, is due to age-long and cankering 
inhibitions, attributable to our traditional Puritan- 
ism. The remedy is a drop to the instinctive level; 
open the floodgates to impulse; a free and spon- 
taneous doing as one pleases in all directions.’ 
Along this line one finds books written and offered 
to the public with the dignified title of ‘The New 
Psychology”; many of them are translations from 
a Teutonic language, with which our American 
nation has little in common at present, and whose 
philosophy we dare not always adopt. 

The motto of the “new morality” is, realize 
thyself, little considering that there are in every 
man two distinct selves, one of which looks upward 
and struggles for the mastery in the attainment 
of perfect manhood, while the other looks down- 
ward and aimlessly drifts toward the bestial. 
What is this but the way of the uncurbed boy of the 
street whom no one admires and of whom no one 
prophesies good? Yet this is taken as a philosophy 
and urged as the way of life. Along this line much of 
the world’s history has been made of late. 

There is an element of truth in the statement 
that the malady of our civilization is “suppressed 
desires”; but there are, in truth, desires and desires. 
In every normal soul there is a desire for the mastery 
in selfhood, for the perfection of personality; to 
indulge this is highly commendable, and altruistic 


2'The Genius of America,’’ by Sherman, p. 224. (Charles 
Scribner’s Sons.) 


20 A Gospel for the New Age 


brotherliness is eminently right. To suppress these 
would be an evil. But men are tragically wrong if 
they think that our national malady is due to any 
suppression of nature by religious restraints, or 
that evil can be cured by the removal of these re- 
ligious restrictions and the release of animal ten- 
dencies—views championed by much of the “new 
thought,” not to say gilded libertinism, of the day. 


THE RESTLESS HUMANITY 


Now, could there be anything more logical than 
that this ‘‘time spirit’? should produce a world- 
wide restlessness and dissatisfaction, and many 
should be brought to realize that the times were 
fearfully out of harmony? While some men, who 
have no fixedness of convictions in their make-up, 
interpreted all this as an evidence of progress, as if 
all motion were progress, there were others with a 
deeper insight who felt that some mighty catastrophe 
awaited mankind. While steam and electricity 
have created a new industrial world, they have not 
improved the social and moral life of the people. 
By amassing humanity in great cities all social 
problems have been enormously intensified. The 
principles of Christianity, ‘‘the science of living 
together,”’ have been largely ignored. In the rush 
and strife of the city crime is multiplied and lust 
and greed fasten their shackles on millions and defy 
the approach of religion. Yet, in grappling with 
these problems, men seem not to think of stopping 
the leak, but set frantically to work bailing out the 
water, saying: ‘““We must confront these problems; 
we must grapple with these terribly dangerous evils.” 


The New World Era 21 


So they began to agitate reform movements, to 
build ‘“‘settlement houses,” soup kitchens, and co- 
operative homes—all of which contributes to the 
relief of the situation, to some extent, but none 
of them goes to the root of difficulty. Every one 
nowadays believes in dealing directly with such prob- 
lems, and money in abundance isavailable for clothing 
the naked, feeding the hungry, and for teaching nimble 
fingers to earn a living; yet social frivolity and moral 
- degeneracy have been fearfully on the increase. 

The world seems to be losing the instinct of moral 
values—the sense of the distinction of character—in 
social intercourse and commercial dealings. In 
former years mothers were very careful concerning 
the companionship of their children and the selec- 
tion of their life companions; but now parents seem 
not concerned about such matters. In other days 
‘charity covered the multitude of faults”; now it is 
the ‘‘big bank account”’ and the clothes that money 
will buy. Once a famous orator said, “I would 
rather be right than to be president”’; now too often 
the motto is: ‘‘Sueceed honestly if you can, but suc- 
ceed.”” Human life has long been considered the 
most precious of all values; then with what a shudder 
one learns that the recent Near East strife, with its 
suffering and death to millions of helpless people, 
was all born of the struggle for the mastery between 
nations for an Eastern oil field! In this deal several 
of the great nations stand condemned. 


DOCTRINAL BREAKDOWN 


During the last generation people grew amazingly 
slack in matters of belief and in their manner of 


22 A Gospel for the New Age 


worship. The stately old hymns were discarded 
for the lighter gospel hymns and sacred songs. The 
old hymns were noble expressions of religious truths; 
the new are often only bursts of rapturous sentiment. 

In the atmosphere of secular colleges and universi- 
ties there grew up, among students and professors 
alike, a pronounced repugnance to the bondage of 
the established forms of denominational subscrip- 
tion, indicating a weakening in loyalty to the old 
faiths. One church came to be regarded as good as 
another; and religious sociability came to take the 
place of the old-time heartfelt religion. Church 
union got in the air, and into the common fold all 
were invited—Unitarians, Evangelicals, Trinitarians, 
notwithstanding the compromises which must be 
made in matters of faith—and all alike were wel- 
comed. To cap the climax a ‘‘ World’s Congress of 
Religions”? was staged, where every shade and kind 
of religion was made welcome. Pagans and Chris- 
tians, Orientals and Westerners, all found seats 
side by side, and the religion of each passed under 
review. In that great religious pageant the religion 
which could blow the loudest horn was allowed to 
“ride in the band wagon,” and this men called ‘‘re- 
ligious progress.” 

That many good people lost moorings in matters 
of faith was evidenced in the estimate given Ralph 
Waldo Emerson, once pastor of the Second Unitarian 
Church, Boston. While pastor there he delivered 
his famous sermon, the only sermon he ever pub- 
lished, in which he declared that he could not in 
administering the Lord’s Supper use the words: 
“This is my blood of the new covenant, shed for you 


The New World Era 23 


and for many, for the remission of sins.”” But the 
congregation demanded the rite after the old form. 
This Mr. Emerson felt he could not consistently 
administer; so, after due deliberation, he gave up 
the pastorate of his only church. Yet to the end 
of his days this man remained a “‘saint.”’ Charles 
Jefferson tells us that “one of the most orthodox of 
evangelical preachers, Father Taylor, declared that 
he had never known so good a Christian as Mr. 
Emerson.” ® 

As an evidence of the colorless cast of Christiani- 
ty of the day, a writer in the Independent, in con- 
tending that the decadence in the Churches made 
no decadence in morals, pointed to the fact that many 
of the best people she knew no longer eared to attend 
church; and in proof of her contention she cited the 
fact that “the leaders in the ‘Reform Movements’ 
in New York never went to church.” In line with 
this same tendency goes the fact of the alarming 
doctrinal latitude in the minds of many who are 
considered orthodox Christians. The Virgin birth 
of Christ, the reality of his miracles, his resurrec- 
tion, his incarnation and redemption through his 
blood, the new birth, heaven and hell, have all, to 
some minds, passed from the realm of reality into 
the fog of myths and dreams. Yet many say: “Let 
them pass. The Sermon on the Mount is amply 
sufficient.”’ Others still more reckless go still further 
and say: “‘The Golden Rule is sufficient; with this 
what care we for more?” At this low ebb of fidelity, 
how men are driven about by every wind of doctrine! 
They give encouragement to every sort of fad and 


3 Minister as Prophet,” p. 155. (Crowell Publishing Co.) 


24 A Gospel for the New Age 


faker who comes along. Many of the leading mem- 
bers in such movements as Dowieism, Russellism, 
Adventism, Christian Science, and the like were 
once ‘‘members in good standing”’ in many of the 
leading orthodox Churches. The man whose name 
stood at the head of the list of supporters of the beau- 
tiful new Christian Science temple off Central Park, 
New York, was a son of one of the most illustrious 
Presbyterian families in that city.4 Officials in the 
Protestant Churches in Washington contributed 
to build a Buddhist temple in that city. False 
Christs gathered devotees, not from the credulous 
world only, but from the bosom of some of the most 
prominent Churches. Possibly there never was an 
age when there were so many and so subtle tempta- 
tions to reduce the Christian religion to a mere 
ethical code. And never was the prestige of the 
Church quite so low. 

Nor does the evil end here; it gets into the very 
lifeblood of the people and manifests its nature in 
various directions. A nondecisive doctrinal belief 
is indicative of imperfect knowledge of or careless 
dealing with the facts of religion. This indifference 
to facts and their source lets a people think of God 
as an zdea only, and not in the strictest sense a liv- 
ing Person. There is a widespread tendency to 
distrust the idea of personality in general. This fact 
emerges in regard to immortality. ‘A great many 
people profess themselves willing to believe in human 
immortality so long as that does not imply personal 
immortality. This is one of those loose conceptions 
of life cherished as a refuge from difficulties, which are 


*Minister as Prophet,’’ p. 158. (Crowell Publishing Co.) 


The New World Era 25 


entirely elusive and misleading. This conception 
of immortality can give satisfaction to one only so 
long as he does not examine the words he uses.” 
Nonpersonal immortality must in every sense reduce 
itself ultimately to something like absorption into 
the general scheme of things, the widely embracing 
universe into which the individual soul returns and 
into which it merges itself. It may suggest a set of 
noble ideas about joining 


“The choir invisible 
Of those immortal dead who live again 
In lives made better by their presence.” 


“To religious sentimentalism this is very pleasant 
and alluring and is exactly suited to the age and in 
keeping with much of the shallow religion afloat. 
This is a sort of a something about which it is easy 
to write poetry.’’> ‘But with all that, one fact re- 
mains—it is not Christianity! Such a dream of 
immortality follows in the line of the conception of 
God not as a Person but a mystical Entity diffused 
throughout all space. 


As OTHERS VIEW US 


The world’s estimate of America’s finance, her 
diplomacy, her inventive skill and individual initia- 
tive is of the highest order. But what of America’s 
religion? That, of course, is just the estimate we 
put upon it ourselves. As compared with money 
values, what rank has religion among us? It is an 
admitted fact that everywhere in America religion 





5“Foundations of Faith,’’ by Kelman, p. 83. (Fleming 
H. Revell Co.) 


26 A Gospel for the New Age 


is at an appallingly low ebb. Whose fault is this? 
When our English brethren visit us, they go home 
and talk about us; and this is what they tell: “‘The 
American preachers are brilliant; they know a great 
many things and are well educated; but they are not 
spiritual. They are lacking in religious fervor and 
fiery passion for souls.”” And they tell a damaging 
truth. This they say of the preachers; but are the 
laymen any more pious? We have beautiful forms 
of worship and the ritual is gone through with grace- 
fully; but the enthusiasm is not in it, and the inspi- 
ration is not there. Many of those who do faithfully 
attend public worship have lost interest, and the 
masses have drifted away. The heart hunger for 
God is seldom felt, and the “‘burden of souls”’ is an 
unknown experience. Can there be any wonder if 
the world loses faith in a Church which has lost 
faith in God and knows little of the vital realities of 
true godliness? No one who truly knows the world 
as it is to-day can doubt that in its innermost soul 
it is skeptical and cold all because of the waning of 
vital godliness in the Churches, together with stress- 
ing of material things to the neglect of the spiritual. 
See how many have lost the “power of an endless 
life” and are grasping after the visible and temporal! 


THE SHRINE OF SUCCESS 


There is one word most characteristic of the Ameri- 
can people, and that word tells at what shrine they 
bow. The wonderful history of the continent may 
to a large extent be the explanation of this trait. 
No other word so largely fills the American mind 
as the idea of success, nor is the manner of achieving 


The New World Era 27 


it always considered. Mothers are still anxious for 
their children; but it is not so much that they make 
noble, upright men and women; but it is that they 
may make a success—that the boys should become 
money-making men, and the girls marry well-to-do 
men. Culture and refinement now, as a first con- 
sideration for their daughters, is a ‘‘back number” 
with many parents. Worldly prosperity is every- 
thing. All business is conducted on the basis of 
success, rather than as a public utility. A book isa 
success, not because it is timely and sane and filled 
with noble ideals and packed with truth, but because 
it sells by the half million copies. Great scientists 
like Davie, Faraday, and Agassiz could have made 
fortunes out of their discoveries; but they cared 
more for science than for gold. To-day the rush is 
for the patent office to secure a patent and become 
rich. A preacher is rated a ‘‘success” not because 
he preaches the gospel truly, but because he “brings 
up his finances.”” Jehovah is the God of many Ameri- 
cans in times of trouble and at death’s door; otherwise 
they bow around the shrine of success. At this 
same shrine worship the many whose methods of 
obtaining money are hidden and not righteous. 
These all bow together with the bediamonded kings 
of finance, the silk-attired and jeweled queens of 
society, and the high-steeple divines whose stipend 
equals that of the governor of the State. 

These all worship at the shrine of ‘“‘Success” so 
long as her bounty is poured into their laps. But 
put this whole company into Job’s sackcloth and 
ashes, and what will they say: ‘Though he slay me, 
yet will I trust him’’? The presumption is that the 


28 A Gospel for the New Age 


wail would be: ‘‘Let us curse God and die.” But 
will such character stand the test? 


TESTED IN WAR’S FLAMES 


A decade ago it had become increasingly evident 
that there was something radically wrong with our 
civilization. The world seemed to be in the grasp of 
an evil power and unable to extricate itself. The 
world was never more advanced and civilized, 
never more refined and cultured, and yet never more 
restless and dissatisfied. Crime was on every hand; 
life was never so insecure nor the future quite so dark. 
If science or culture could have saved the world, it 
would gladly have done so. The scientists were say- 
ing that the world is too much civilized and scientific 
to go to war; its difficulties will be otherwise settled. 
Men of commerce said that war costs too much; men 
cannot afford it. They love money too much to go 
into a pandemonium of destruction. Statesmen 
said that we will settle our world disputes in the 
“parliament of man,” so diplomats were pitting 
diplomacy against diplomacy to maintain equity 
among nations and keep the world at peace. Others 
there were who said that the world is too good for 
the horrors of war. The brotherhood of man has 
advanced too far; the world will not go to war, for 
humanity’s sake. Others again trusted to Chris- 
tian refinement to dominate the minds of men. 
But the war followed, with all its terrible tide of 
destruction of life and property—the most stu- 
pendous folly since the crucifixion of Christ. 

But why did the bulwarks of society give way 
when they were needed most? The one verdict is, 


The New World Era 29 


they gave way because the world had come to look 
to the shadow and not the substance, the form, not 
the fact, and to trust in creed rather that in Christ 
himself. When men set their hearts on material 
things, trusting to a pagan commerce, an agnostic 
science, a civilization made up of unredeemed man- 
kind which forgets God and repudiates his authority, 
and looks to a religion without the Spirit of God in 
it, what wonder that the world went to pieces as it 
did in nineteen hundred and fourteen to eighteen? 

The ancient unrepealed law is: ‘“‘Thou shall have 
no other gods before me.” Knowing the world 
condition to have been what it was when the Word 
War broke out, was there any wonder that when a 
reckless Serbian youth threw the explosive bomb 
into the sulphurous atmosphere three hundred 
billions of the world’s dollar gods went up in war 
smoke and down tumbled much of the world’s 
cob-house civilization and its trash was consumed 
in the flames? Why should not such trash be con- 
sumed? It had become a burden to the world, and 
doubtless God himself had become tired of such 
folly, or he would not have turned the world over to 
evil men to work all manner of destruction with 
greediness. 

Empty-handed and distressed, men came at last 
to turn their faces up to the God of all grace, who 
was evidently bringing mankind back to the funda- 
mental principles of the Christian religion, and to- 
day he is prompting men to reconstruct the world on 
a saner foundation. The bankrupt nations and hun- 
gry people are looking to God’s children for help. 
Even Wall Street sent out through government 


30 A Gospel for the New Age 


channels an appeal to Christian ministers, asking for 
the agitation of common honesty and fair dealing, 
saying: “Without your help our vaults are worth- 
less.”’ 

But why this appeal to an institution which dur- 
ing the early days of the World War was pronounced 
a “‘failure,”’ and when such men as Edward Car- 
penter, Charles A. Ellwood, and others of a more 
questionable type are saying, ‘“‘The hour of its exit 
has come’’? But is Christianity dead? What are 
some of the facts? Immediately after the close of 
the Great War the evangelical Churches placed 
upon Christ’s altar millions upon millions for Mis- 
sions, for Christian Education, for feeding and cloth- 
ing the distressed and starving nations, all for the 
ongoing of the kingdom. Great publishers began to 
turn out streams of most excellent religious books, 
and the largest single order for Bibles ever known 
came into the American Bible Society. Add to this 
the fact that the 1923 religious report shows the 
largest annual accession to the Christian Church in 
all its illustrious history. Are these the throes of 
death, the agonies of a discarded institution? Nay; 
but are they not the evidence of pulsing power of 
life reaching out for greater conquests? 

Thoughtful men everywhere had come to realize 
that the world, and not Christianity, had failed; 
and while the nations were writhing in their defeat 
and follies, the religion of Christ was hoisting her 
sails and proclaiming: ‘‘All hail, illustrious Future!’ 
This she does with the realization that being en- 
trenched in vital religion is the strength of nations 
and the hope of the future. This is the most stable 


The New World Era 31 


something in all the world, and the something around 
which all world reconstruction must stand. Without 
this, with its foundation in God and eternity, there 
can be no lasting confidence between man and man 
or permanent national hope. Herein all confidence 
lives, all obligations rest. The thoughtless world 
clamors for Christian sentiment; but the practical 
world needs, more than anything else, the realities 
of religion as Jesus taught it. This it needs to clear 
the uncertain skies, to cleanse individual lives, and 
to inspire new hope in a despondent world. Lessing 
once said: ‘Christianity has been tried for eighteen 
hundred years, but it still remains to try the religion 
of Jesus.”” The Churches are trying all sorts of sub- 
stitutes—suppers, lyceum lectures, pageants, com- 
munity programs, etc. What they need is to take 
the advice of the great editor, Horace Greeley, and 
“try religion.” 

For this we plead: Try religion as Jesus taught it, 
pure and simple—religion with the idea of God as 
a Father revealed in his Son, with the new birth or 
human redemption as the hope of humanity, with 
the Spirit’s indwelling, sweet and sane holy living, 
and the ultimate conversion of the world. Such a 
religion the world seems to have forgotten, hence 
it welters and gropes in defeat. Having learned to 
plate baser metals to resemble real gold, the world 
wants to palm off on needy humanity and a righteous 
God a camouflaged religion; but God is not mocked, 
neither are men deceived. They know the sad con- 
sequences of such folly. 

The old world is in a sad plight. With all its 
scientific discoveries, all of its wisdom and its radio 


32 A Gospel for the New Age 


system to speak to all the earth, it has no message 
and nothing to say. How hopeless and leaderless 
the nations of earth are to-day! But out of the 
depths comes the sad appeal for help. During the 
days when ‘‘the angel of death spread his wings on 
the blast,’’ men did not care to hear of boasted 
scientific discovery or the discussion of unsettled 
religious questions. During such days the men said: 
“Away with your ‘sob stuff’; give us real religion.” 
Only this can strengthen the hero, maintain morale, 
and comfort the dying. Though the bugle call to 
arms is hushed and our flag is no longer at half-mast, 
the warfare of life is still on and the foe is deeply 
entrenched. Practical business men do not hesitate 
to say, with Judge Ben H. Lindsey, that the “‘failure 
of modern religion and education is to blame for the 
breakdown in society. The Church has lost its grip 
because of its own condition.’’® In like strain is the 
statement that ‘‘what we need is to get back to the 
religion of Christ.’’? 

With such an appeal we face the issue, not with 
the gospel of uncertainty, negations, and doubt; 
nay, not that; but with the gospel of certainty, the 
gospel of affirmation and of the eternal verities, for 
only this is dynamic, only this a glorious reality. 
With such a gospel as this, its banners flung out to 
the breezes and our face to the future, is there any 
wonder we thrill with the thought: 

“Out of the depths of the night 


The world rolls into the light; 
It is daybreak everywhere!’’ 


6 Denver Dispatch, September 11, 1923. 
7 Muskogee Chamber of Commerce, Oklahoma, 1922. 


CHAPTER II 


RELIGION: THE GREATEST REALITY, THE FOUNDATION 
PRINCIPLE 
3 


RELIGION 


RELIGION is no low-bred thing, 
Though cast in common clay. 

She, wafted hence on angel wing 
From far-off realms of day, 

Hath come at Love’s behest to heed 
Man’s supreme soul demand 

And, in his darkest hour of need, 
Walk with him hand in hand. 


Her spirit steals into the heart 
Like sunshine into life; 

And beauty rare she doth impart 
To man’s hard battle strife; 

And by her winsome mystic charm 
In love’s soft accent sweet, 

Life’s dull discord she doth transform 
And crown with joy replete. 


And should the noble hero soul, 
On splendid conquest bent, 
Let vision fade and ardor cool 
In brooding discontent— 
’Tis then she whispers sweet and clear 
Her inspirations high: 
Behold the tide of life is here, 
The promised day is nigh! 
C. HH. B. 


CHAPTER II 


RELIGION: THE GREATEST REALITY, THE 
FOUNDATION PRINCIPLE 


LIFE is ever struggling to express itself anew; and 
since religion is the emotion of a living soul, what 
- wonder that there should be repeated efforts to tell 
what religion really is? 

If asked why I am religious, my answer would be: 
““Because I cannot help it.”"4 I was born that way 
and cannot unmake myself. To say that religion is 
an inheritance from our ancestors would be only to 
shove the problem of its origin back into the darkness 
of the past. Where did our ancestors get their re- 
ligion? The instinct is in man, the world is full of it, 
and it is the most dynamic something with which we 
have to deal. As such it attracts attention and chal- 
lenges investigation. 

What is religion? A good and satisfactory defini- 
tion is most difficult to write for the reason that 
every man has his individual religious experience 
and no one definition would exactly fit all cases, but 
would vary as widely as the dispositions of men. 
Ask a deeply pious man what religion is, and no 
doubt he would answer: ‘‘My religion is a deep and 
real sentiment within me, sustaining and satisfying 
my soul, which makes me want to know God and 
seek to do his will.’”’ Yet this is, in fact, a descrip- 
tion and not a definition of what religion is. It 


1Sabatier. 


(35) 


36 A Gospel for the New Age 


tells briefly how that something within affects him, 
rather than to set forth what it is or whence it came. 

Who does not feel that religion, like speech, is a 
part of himself, springing from a fountain fixed deep 
in his nature? Man, having the power of speech, 
goes on talking without ever asking why. Language 
has grown, though mankind was hardly conscious 
of its growth. It grew out of the ability to utter 
sounds as the symbols of thought; and the mental 
capacity to think thoughts and express them is 
termed the “faculty of speech.” So with religion. 
As a potent principle it is at least the assertion of a 
conscious power within. In this subjective sense it 
can be said that while there are many “religions” 
in the world, they all have one source—namely, a 
religious nature out of which the many religions 
spring. 

Thus we may safely speak of religion as a per- 
manent and universal element in man. Mankind 
in general has a sense of natural imperfection, a 
feeling of dependence, an inclination to veneration 
and devotion. These man feels without being 
able to understand why. In fact, these emotions 
are the first principles of his religion, and he does not 
need to know just why he was thus created. 

That this latent power so common to man and 
planted deep in his nature should vary in process of 
development is not at all surprising, since there are 
natural causes back of the variations. That which 
is generic in man as a whole expresses itself in his 
religion, and man’s natural spontaneity is seen here 
as elsewhere. Man develops religion in keeping 
with his individuality and environment. Man in 


Religion: The Greatest Reality 37 


all stages of life has a tendency to be influenced by 
his surroundings. Hence there is in history a pa- 
gan religion, a Greek and Roman and a Christian 
religion, embodying racial and age peculiarities, 
whether ancient or modern, Oriential or Western. 

That the general term “‘religion”’ is expressive of a 
world-wide feature of humanity needs little more 
than a statement. All around the globe and as far 
back as the light of history reaches religious be- 
liefs and customs are to be found. Corresponding 
to these beliefs and customs are devout feelings, an 
acknowledgement of an occult supernaturalism, a 
power greater than man that should be propitiated. 
“There are certain devotions, such as prayers, 
praises, and sacrificial offerings, with corresponding 
emotions, such as awe, fear, hope, joy, a desire to 
please the God or gods—sometimes displeasure and 
rebuke when protection and blessings are thought 
to be withheld.”’ These we recognize as the common 
emotions of religion, many of which are prominent 
in our Christianity to-day. Yet, notwithstanding 
the common basis of all religions, there are found in 
our Christianity certain elements distinctively its 
own, giving it superiority. 


WHENCE CAME RELIGION? 


So essential is religion in the nature of man, per- 
vading and dominating his individual and social 
life, that science, inquiring into the origin and nature 
of things, has come up face to face with the question: 
How did mankind become religious? 

How did man acquire the religious habit? May 
not his worshiping tendencies indeed be the result of 


38 A Gospel for the New Age 


“‘sensations,” the product of certain vibrations dis- 
turbing the gray matter of the brain? Could it not 
have been possible for the plastic mind of man to 
have been so impressed by environment as to have 
developed the habit of worship which has by the 
laws of heredity become a fixed fact in life? But to 
entertain such an idea would be to admit of “‘spon- 
taneous generation,” which theory has broken down 
under severe tests, and is as absurd in religion as it 
has been found to be in biology. 

Again, could man’s religion not possibly have been 
caught from dreams or evolved from fear, as many 
have long tried to make it appear? One of the Latin 
poets said: ‘‘It was fear that engendered the gods.” 
Now, there is an extent to which this is true. One 
must admit that religion may have been awakened 
by terror when the utter helplessness of mankind was 
realized. Thrown out as but a child, exposed to the 
dangers of nature as found in storms, diseases, and 
death, his would be a state of misery and distress 
which would fill his heart at times with unlimited 
terror. To seek assistance under such conditions 
would be a most natural impulse. But why “the 
gods” rather than some material protection? Would 
not the protection of his cave dwelling, his club, and 
his spear have been sufficient? What could have 
suggested to the child mind of primitive man the 
existence of a superhuman Intelligence to be sought 
as Friend or propitiated as a powerful, dreaded 
enemy? But why should the sense of fear be con- 
nected with religion at all? Do not the lower crea- 
tures in impending danger show a mastering sense 
of fear? Yet we do not call this religion. How does 


Religion: The Greatest Reality 39 


man’s fear differ from theirs? The difference comes 
in the fact of man’s religious nature by the help of 
which he seeks to rise above danger and be rid of 
terror. Fear in itself is not religion; it paralyzes, 
crushes, and stuns. In order that fear may become 
religiously fruitful it must be mixed with an impulse 
of hope. It is necessary that man, the prey of fear, 
should find above him a source of help and strength 
_by which to confront the danger and overcome it. 
Fear has an element of religion in it only when it 
awakens a sense of personal dependence and calls 
forth prayer, which opens up a way out of human 
distress. The one great question of humanity in 
religion is always salvation, and any experience which 
gives coloring to this hope is indeed blessed. 

It cannot be doubted that religion was at first 
called forth to a large extent by a sense of dependence 
and at times fear; but if there were no latent re- 
ligion asleep in the soul, as the forest is folded up in 
the acorn, how could it ever have been awakened? 
Fear never was and in reality never can be religion. 
At best it can only reveal man’s need of safety, and 
perchance lead him to exercise his religious privileges 
of prayer and righteous hope and trust in God. 
But the nature of holiness is such as to preclude the 
possibility of fear having originated religion. 

Neither could religion have been planted in man 
by a “pious priesthood,” as is sometimes held. True, 
religion has largely spread over the earth by evangel- 
ism. Yet one has but to ask, Where did the priests 
first get their religion; who were their primogenitors, 
to give them first lessons in “holy exercises’? The 
priest has had his task, drawing out the latent re- 


40 A Gospel for the New Age 


ligions of the people, and he is a mighty power in all 
religions. 


THE BIBLE AND RELIGION 


Did religion not come out of the Bible? At present: 
the Bible is looked to as the fountainhead of religion. 
It is used largely as the best means of establish- 
ing Christianity everywhere. But religion did not 
originate in the sacred Scriptures. The patriarchs 
were profoundly religious long before the Scriptures 
were written. If there were no religious nature in 
man, the Bible would be a meaningless book, if 
indeed it could have been written. It is for us the 
treasury of religious truths—the story of God’s 
dealings with men and his will concerning them. 
If the Bible were lost, holy men would set about to 
write another one. In fact, holy men have never 
ceased to write as they are moved bythe Holy Spirit. 
The revelation of God continues, because we have 
not an extinct Divinity or an exhausted Providence. 

While religion did not originate with priests or in 
the Scriptures, yet these agencies serve best in the 
propagation of religion. They satisfy our needs 
and inspire a religious zeal, or may prevent or cor- 
rect an error. But they could not have planted the 
original spark in the soul of man or awakened that 
which was never inherent. We have excellent au- 
thority for thinking that man was created to seek 
the Lord “if haply he might feel after him, and find 
him.” 

RELIGION Not A HUMAN PRODUCT 

If religion were a normal or human product ane 

everywhere subject to rational analysis, then phi- 


Religion: The Greatest Reality 41 


losophy would be the means by which its contents 
might be determined, and rationalism would be our 
proud boast. In this case the Bible would be ad- 
mittedly no whit different from any other profound 
book, and that which has held its place through the 
centuries as the one inerrant inspired volume would 
be found the most stupendous fraud of all. But truth 
alone, and not fraud, can keep its hold upon the 
human heart through the vicissitudes of the troubled 
ages and amid the changes incident to the progress 
of man and the advancement of learning. If, on the 
other hand, it be admitted that religion came as “‘a 
revelation to the race’”—an added force which at a 
certain stage of human development was impressed 
from without—then it were manifest that reason 
was not capable of arriving at the great fact, else 
it would have been left for man to make the grand 
discovery. Again, after religion had been discovered, 
it would still be necessary to show that it brings to 
man an adequate fulfillment of all his spiritual 
needs—wants which reason may cherish but can 
never satisfy. To show that reason could satisfy 
the needs of the soul would of itself be indeed a most 
difficult problem. 

To say that religion is a “mystery” is not con- 
vincing; such a position would be to take refuge in 
darkness. There are features in religion—the spirit- 
ual birth is one—which do not admit of rational 
explanation, just as there are depths in the human 
mind which no metaphysician has ever sounded. 
A religion which could not be intelligently considered 
would be a “curiosity,” a gross superstition, and 
devoid of all connection with religious needs, hence 


42 A Gospel for the New Age 


useless to hungry hearts and therefore unworthy of 
dignified consideration. True, the word “mystery” 
was often upon the lips of the apostles, and a few 
times used by our Lord himself. But when used by 
them it implied ‘‘that which is known only to the 
initiated,”’ which was far different from a something 
incomprehensible to man. The “mystery” of which 
they spoke was none other than the long-kept secret 
of God’s plan of salvation which, ‘when the fullness 
of time had come,”’ was manifest in Christ Jesus and 
was felt in the hearts of all who believed on his 
name. In them it shone as a great light which 
should henceforth enlighten the world. To the un- 
converted to-day the religion of our Lord Jesus 
Christ is indeed a ‘‘mystery.”’ They see its effects, 
but know not the secret of its power. 

While we prize our religion as the highest and most 
sacred deposit of human life, what shall we say it 
really is? Shall we class it, as do some, with “‘social 
force’’? or shall we regard it as a “‘mode of emotion” 
as Lecky does? Shall we call it, with Kant, “the 
recognition of all our duties and divine commands,” 
or with Spencer, “‘an awe in the presence of the 
mystery of an inscrutable power in the universe’’? 
Shall we think of it as Mill did, as ‘‘the infinite 
nature of duty,” or with Schleiermacher, as ‘“‘the 
immediate feeling of dependence upon God,” or 
with Matthew Arnold, as “morality touched by 
emotion,” or with Pascal, ‘‘God at work in the soul’’? 
All these express rather the outward manifestation 
of religion, as a scientist would view it, without go- 
ing to the depth of the thing itself. Without man’s 
social relation with his fellows he might never be 


Religion: The Greatest Reality 43 


thrilled by its peace, yet religion is constitutional, 
inalienable, spiritual. The elemental potentiality of 
religion is always present. Social relations call its 
faculties into exercise and furnish a field of fruitage. 


RELIGION DEFINED 


Religion, as a natural characteristic and essential 
element in the constitution of man, is purely of 
divine origin. Its emotions are as instinctive as any 
that man experiences. It is therefore admissible to 
speak of religion, in its origin and emotions, as the 
result of a divine and supersensible influence exerted 
upon the inner life of man—‘‘where piety is there 
God is at work’”2*—by which intuitions other than 
reason arise, such as the senses could never supply. 
These constitute Just those phenomena which thrust 
themselves upon us with immediate certainty. These 
impulses every devout soul has felt, and he asks no 
greater proof than his own experience. This fact is 
true of all alike. Mankind could hardly have con- 
ceived of a Supreme Being and come to worship him 
without at the same time feeling that the Great 
Spirit entered into communication with man. 
Doubtless the germ of this truth lies in the “still 
small voice” heard in the soul, which man did not 
originate and of which he cannot wholly dispossess 
himself, 

AN ACTIVE PRINCIPLE 


Thus far religion has been approached from its 
passive side and considered purely as a “natural 
gift.” Yet this is but half the truth. To know what 


2Pascal. 


44. A Gospel for the New Age 


religion really is, not only its passive nature, but its 
active character must be considered. 

Human personality appears more definitely at 
this point than in any other of man’s relation. In 
religion, as in connection with all other gifts, the 
real benefit depends upon the use man makes of it; 
therefore, if left dormant and neglected in the soul 
or perverted by misuse, it may not prove a blessing, 
but become a detriment. Much of the dissipation 
of mankind can be traced directly to the feeding a 
religiously hungry soul, not upon the food God 
meant it to have, but upon some husks of material 
things. 

There may not be any practical benefit in merely 
possessing a religious nature. A very bad man may 
have that as truly as a good one. What man needs 
is a “religious character.”’ What does it signify if, 
while one’s nature is feeling after God, his life is 
utterly against him? A man may have a natural 
sense of honor, but this does not make him an honor- 
able man when he betrays every trust and violates 
every bond of friendship. Even a thief may have 
a fine sense of justice and be all the more conscious 
of his own guilt because of it. There may be a 
wonderfully tender sensibility in the heart of an 
assassin, such that in the presence of his family or 
his clan he will be abundant in gentle and kind 
offices. Of Robert G. Ingersoll it was said by his 
own niece, “Uncle Robert would not harm a worm”’; 
yet this same tender-hearted man, in conversation 
with a grief-stricken mother who cherished a Bible 
hope of once more meeting her angel babe, brutally 
declared: ‘‘ Your Bible is a myth, madam; you have 


Religion: The Greatest Reality 45 


no hope.”” A man may have the finest reverence for 
God, the highest admiration for his character, the 
greatest rational conception of the value of God’s 
moral government in the world, and yet not have 
so much as a spark of real piety. He may enjoy 
the greatness and goodness of God without a trace 
of a real religious character. 

“The religious nature, as a mere natural tendency, 
is as different from a religious character as what we 
are by nature is different from what we do, definitely 
seek, and freely become.” The life of choice is the 
something for which we are responsible. Character 
is found in that which the soul deliberately goes after, 
with a reigning devotion—what it selects and lives 
for as an end. If aman, therefore, lives for himself, 
for the world, as all sinners do, he is without God 
and without religious character, and is all the more 
guilty in it, since his nature is feeling after God in 
the throes of disappointed longing. Then let it be 
understood that souls were made for God. They are 
to live, move, and have their being in him—not as 
omniscience, but as an inwardly felt presence. They 
are to know God as they know themselves. Noth- 
ing but a voluntary surrender of the whole life to 
God’s will prepares the soul to be set in the open 
before its God. No emotion of mere natural senti- 
ment will suffice. It is only as God comes into the 
soul and lives in it that religious character begins. 
The soul, though it may be feeling instinctively 
after God, if baffled still and kept back by self-will 
and self-devotion, has no trace of real piety. But 
when it communes knowingly with God, receives 


46 A Gospel for the New Age 


him, and walks with him, then it is the reality of re- 
ligion is discovered. 

On the other hand, this natural gift of a religious 
nature may not only be left undeveloped, but abused 
till men are deluded into believing themselves to be 
skeptical—that there is no God. But they cannot 
get away from the memory of its influence. Reck- 
less, sinful men may seem to forget religion; but in 
times of great danger, such as facing death on the 
battle field, they remember that there is a God. 
Often, after spending years in sin and in blasphem- 
ing against God, men have come, as did Commodore 
C. Vanderbilt, to regret the absence of religious in- 
fluences in early life, and die trusting in God. The 
wickedness of men cannot destroy the groundwork 
of God in the soul. By neglect personal piety may 
become a negligible quantity. Such was clearly the 
case with an illustrious scientist. After spending 
years in scientific research to establish his fond 
theory of “natural selection,” during which time 
he scarcely gave a thought to the cravings of his 
own soul, he came to lose all esthetic sensibility, 
including even his fondness for music and the poetry 
of Shakespeare. When interviewed on the subject 
and asked if he had not at some time in his life felt a 
fondness for such things and felt the call of God in 
his soul, he dreamily replied, ‘‘ Yes, but it seems so 
far away’”’—thus admitting the logical sequence. 
In his own experience his fond theory of “‘evolution”’ 
had operated in the opposite direction. In place of 
“evoluting”’ him up toward perfect manhood, where 
mystic sweetness was real and his soul in tune with 


3 “Life of C. F. Deems,” p. 271. (Fleming H. Revell Co.) 


Religion: The Greatest Reality A7 


the infinite, it had pulled him down to where his life 
was deflowered of its chief charms which make life 
worth the living and the future worth aspiring unto. 
As in primitive races, religion may be so low in grade 
and so hidden as to escape detection. Yet, as the 
missionaries have found, even there the faculty is 
latent and may be readily developed—showing that 
man as such is a religious being. 


As SEEN IN MATURE LIFE 


With certain writers it is quite a habit to resort to 
the jungle and study conditions there to learn what 
religion in primitive man was. But while religion 
is a race heritage with us to-day, what it was in pre- 
historic man is purely a guess, and will remain so 
till it can be learned just what we have lost or gained 
in the long process of development. In determining 
man’s other powers, we do not study him in infancy 
or adolescence alone, but in his mature state. In 
all adult races religion exists. Man did not abandon 
it as he did his stone implements and cave dwellings. 
Doubtless religion has intensified as man progressed, 
and in civilized and enlightened man it more nearly 
reaches scientific expression, and its highest forms 
are more significant of its real nature. Not as it is 
manifest in the grotesque superstitions of the savage, 
but as we know it to-day and feel its power within 
us, does it arrest our attention and challenge in- 
vestigation. 

There is in the matured Christian a craving after 
a “final cause’’; and this craving can no more be 
extinguished than can be man’s belief in “objective 
reality.” The most hopeful indication of our age 


48 A Gospel for the New Age 


and chief characteristic of the times is an ¢nstinctive 
longing for the truth—a decided ‘‘passion for reali- 
ty.” This is the prime incentive in all our scientific 
research, and should be the soul of all critical effort 
in literature. It is the foundation of all true learn- 
ing. This “passion” has been faithfully at work in 
our theology; and while it may have spoiled many of 
our dogmas, it could not but have stabilized our faith. 
The time may have been when men could be satisfied 
with “pious frauds” and risk their immortal hopes 
on mere superstitions; but at the cost of martyred 
millions that day has passed, and now the cry is: “At 
whatever cost, let us have the truth.” All else must 
fade and be forgotten. The modern man is out for 
realities, and he feels heartsick in the atmosphere 
of dreams. He wants ethical results in his religion 
most of all. Said Thomas Carlyle, the apostle of the 
real: ‘A man’s religion is the greatest fact in his life.’ 
Of his own books he said: “I have but one thing to 
say from beginning to end of them all, and that is, 
there is no other reliance for this world on any other, 
but just Truth. And if men do not want to be 
damned eternally, they had better give up lying and 
all other kinds of falsehood.” In this he speaks as 
the high priest of reality. Who can feel safe under 
any other régime? What soul could be satisfied 
with that which he must suspect as being untrue? 
As the mind craves knowledge and the heart affec- 
tion, so the soul demands truth. Whatever else 
may be fictitious, a man’s religion must be true. The 
polarity of his soul, expressed in his religious in- 
stincts, is not false. This is the guiding star of his 


Religion: The Greatest Reality 49 


destiny and brings him into the possession of the 
“pearl of great price’’—the completion of being. 

It is this fact of the real in our religion that gives 
it the hold upon the hearts of men from which no 
amount of persecution has ever been able to dislodge 
it. Under the spell of its power mankind has been 
urged forward toward an ever-increasing predom- 
inance of the soul over the life of the flesh, piloted 
by the hope of some day reaching that cosmic stage 
wherein the will of God shall be done upon earth as 
it is done in heaven, and the spirit of the Master reign 
supreme among men. 

Out of the fidelity of those men whose lives have 
been given over to the ways of the Spirit and in 
whom religion has been allowed to fill all its offices 
have come some of the most thrilling chapters of 
human history replete with sublimest heroism in the 
noblest accomplishments of life. 

Sir William Hamilton said: “‘There is nothing 
great on earth but man, and nothing great in man 
but mind.” But Sir William was a metaphysician, 
else he would have gone further and added, ‘‘ There 
is nothing great in mind but religion,” since it is 
this “life of God in the soul” which differentiates 
man from all the rest of creation. This difference 
is in kind and not in degree only, and this makes man 
the chief glory of the universe and the object of 
special divine care. 

Says John Fiske: ‘‘Humanity is not a local ac- 
cident in- an endless series of cosmic changes.” 
Neither is his religion an accident in man’s life. 
There is a divine purpose running through it all. 
By its guidance and restraints alone shall man reach 


4 


50 A Gospel for the New Age 


the goal of his existence, while without its light in his 
life his spiritual nature would flower in an arctic 
night, and he would fall a prey to discouragement 
and moral apathy. 

That men might be free to worship God as they 
wish and enjoy the benefits of religion has always 
been cherished as the greatest right, the highest 
expression of human liberty. In it are found the 
basis of real personality and the foundation of all 
righteousness. And rather than be robbed of such 
a boon, see how men have gone into bitter banish- 
ment or died amid the flames at the martyr’s stake! 

Nor has man’s jealousy for his religion been alto- 
gether a vain or fruitless affair. Notwithstanding 
the crimes which have been committed in her name, 
what agency has been so potent and prolific in guid- 
ing the affairs of men and shaping the destiny of 
nations? It has been the bond of union in perplexing 
tribal affairs as well as the source of inspiration 
in statehood’s highest achievements. Its instincts 
have led to man’s purest patriotism. Of any people 
or nation it can be said: “Their God is their glory.” 
What great leaders or people have ever lived who 
were destitute of religion? From the days of Abra- 
ham or Demosthenes down to the present, in a suc- 
cession rarely broken, they whose names have been 
honored and whose work has lived have been men 
who gripped the heart of the people, held their 
sympathies, and carried them forward by a strong 
current of religion. 


MAN INCURABLY RELIGIOUS 


Man can no more get away from religion than he 
can escape from his better self. He may deny that 


Religion: The Greatest Reality 51 


there is a God, yet he will go on in his profanity 
taking the name of God in vain. In an hour of 
revolt he may will to have nothing to do with re- 
ligion; but znstinct is greater than will, and religion 
somehow prevails. One of the Roman emperors 
spent his life persecuting the Christians, trying to 
stamp out Christianity, and in his dying moments 
exclaimed: “Ah, Nazarene, thou art conqueror.” 
Voltaire gave the force of his wit and learning to 
denying Christianity. His battle cry was, “Crush 
the Wretch”—meaning Christ. Yet his head was 
hardly cold till his infidel printing presses were set 
to printing the Bible. Gibbon was not a believer in 
Christ, yet in his “Decline and Fall of the Roman 
Empire,” in which he invested twenty of the creami- 
est years of his life, in his immortal fifteenth chapter, 
on the influence of Christianity, he unintentionally 
pays Christianity one of the finest tributes in litera- 
ture. August Comte spent his life summarizing the 
frigid lifeless philosophy of Rationalism and _ filled 
six heavy volumes with his rationalistic theories. 
But when he came to write his seventh volume, 
““Morals,”’ he must needs discover or invent a god— 
de Nouveau Htre Supreme—a deified humanity; 
and gathering his disciples in Positive Philosophy 
around him to organize a society, he said: “We 
shall have nothing to do with priests or the Church.” 
But when his casting came forth, behold it was a 
system of worship with a “‘divinity to be adored, to 
be approached with prayer, worshiped with due 
rites, and served by numerous priests,’ of whom he 
himself was the High Priest. 

“Man,” says Shelling, “in the very act of organ- 


52 A Gospel for the New Age 


izing society realizes religion; for without religion 
there can be no society. Religion is at the roots of 
society and runs through all its laws and customs. 
Society is only where religion has begun to be.” 
It does not require a miracle to create religion; 
but it would require a miracle indeed to get rid of it, 
and thereby denaturalize man. So constantly has 
the idea of religion been with man that his nature 
has always been at its best, whether in the individual 
or nation, where the religious conception has been 
strongest. This is a fact capable of historical proof— 
incapable of historical disproof. ‘To the masters, 
in the days of the glory of Greece and Rome, art 
was religion. The temple and sculpture which 
glorified the gods declared the excellence of religion. 
The medieval cathedrals, dotting middle Europe 
like stars in the night, were built with as deeply 
religious fervor as ever burned on the altar of the 
soul. All pagan literature that has been great has 
lived because of its religious feature. There is in 
India a wonderful literature, vast and immense. 
“It begins,” says Dr. A. M. Fairbairn, “with the 
Rig Veda (sacred hymns) about 1500 B.C. and comes 
through the great Epics, Law Books, and Philos- 
ophers, to the Puranas, almost to our day. But 
what marks it? Why, religion. Here, as everywhere 
else, the purer and sublimer the religious ideal, the 
finer and nobler the literature.’”’ The Chinese, also, 
have a great literature, but it is the exposition of . 
religion as the rules by which they live. The Jews 
were a great people; though but a handful at home, 
rude and unlettered in a sense, yet they created 
what from a literary viewpoint was the most ex- 


Religion: The Greatest Reality 53 


traordinary literature in the world—namely, the 
Bible, which is but a history of their religious ideals. 
What book or what kind of poetry holds our hearts 
and lives with us to-day? Not books of passion, 
but such works as Milton and Tennyson, Words- 
worth and Browning, which are saturated with re- 
ligion. These live because they speak for the soul 
and tell us of God. 

“Our country,” says one, “has never profoundly 
respected any man who was destitute of religion.” 
Sometimes it occurs that a brilliant scoundrel gets 
possession of the reins of the government and for a 
while dazzles the eyes of the people; but who in his 
quiet moments does not shudder with foreboding 
lest the nation be heading toward swift destruction? 
But the men who have been great national leaders 
and have held the affection and confidence of the 
people have been men, from Washington to Wood- 
row Wilson, who were profoundly religious—men of 
faith and prayer and of high, clean souls. 

All such men have unique characteristics. In 
them is found what Lord Roseberg found in Crom- 
well, ‘‘a practical mystic, a most terrible and formid- 
able combination’’—terribly in earnest and most 
formidable because of an immovable resolution 
when conscience speaks and duty is known. Such 
men are regaled by an unseen fountain. They are 
thrilled by forces which stream into them from the 
spiritual realm, and are sustained by visions denied 
the ordinary man. This combination of forces en- 
ables them to apply practical skill to the realization 
of far-off ideals. This they do with an utter unselfish- 


54 A Gospel for the New Age 


ness which reveals elements of true leadership which 
men readily recognize and freely follow. 

Such, indeed, are some of the characteristics of 
religion when rightly understood and truly lived. 
It is God’s best gift to man, a guiding star in the 
night of his pilgrimage here, a light which never goes 
out. There is mystery in it all, a depth which no 
man can fathom, a something greater than nature. 
But that mystery fits in perfectly with all the plans 
of human welfare, making life harmonious and beau- 
tiful; while without it life itself would be a purpose- 
less enigma, a problem unsolved. They who have 
tested their religion in daily living have found it 
unspeakably precious. They derive from it a 
strength found nowhere else, and hence do not say 
and do foolish things under the lash of criticism or 
the fires of temptation. ‘They have the witness in 
themselves”’ to a truth which to some is foolishness 
and to others a stumblingblock, but to them that 
believe it is ‘‘the power of God and the wisdom of 
God,” a power which makes for righteousness and 
in the end everlasting life. 


Is RELIGION NECESSARY? 


Notwithstanding all that has been said in reli- 
gion’s favor and the wonderful good it has accom- 
plished in the world, there are those of a skeptical 
frame of mind who seem honestly to believe that 
religion is only a kind of fad and not at all necessary. 
Others there are who go further and say that religion 
is not only not necessary, but an actual hindrance to 
mankind. The number who think thus of God’s 
best gift to mankind is surprisingly large. Like 


Religion: The Greatest Reality 55 


many others of man’s great blessings, religion has 
been shamefully abused at times. Many crimes 
flow from mistaken religious zeal. Men try to offer 
substitutes for religion and hold that science and 
morality would uplift mankind better without it. 
But this is a fact far from being established. In 
those countries where science and knowledge have 
been pushed to their highest along irreligious lines, 
the reverse is a fact of history. Under such influ- 
ences men have not only become unprincipled and 
cruel, but seem to be heading in the direction of the 
tiger, rather than the goal of exalted human life. 

While human progress under the influence of re- 
ligion, with all its inspiration, its quickened con- 
science, its consolations and restraints, has been 
slow enough at best, only God in heaven knows where 
mankind would stand without these salutary in- 
fluences. The substitution of morality for religion 
is the shallowest sophistry. At bottom real morality 
is possible only because of the religious instinct. 
Out of this same source springs all man’s ethical 
sense, or “‘oughtness.” He feels under obligation 
to his fellow man only because his Creator has plant- 
ed within him such an instinct; and man is under 
obligations to society only because he is under the 
higher obligation to Almighty God. The two duties 
are one and the same. 

It would be impossible to write a true history of 
mankind and ignore the supreme power forming 
his character and shaping his destiny. To think of 
denying the rich inheritance of religion would be 
like a banker denying his indebtedness to the ac- 
cumulated capital in earlier days of the bank’s 


56 A Gospel for the New Age 


existence. There is not a lofty ideal in modern 
civilization which our Saviour did not anticipate 
and whose seed he did not sow. The altruism of 
humanity—in fact, the word “humane’’ itself— 
did not exist in any language till the idea was in- 
culcated by Christianity. 

Religion as an essential in our natures will not 
down, because a wise Creator has planted it there; 
and, as Mr. Lecky has said, ‘‘ We cannot get rid of the 
fact that it is to religion and its influence that the 
great force of moral sentiment is due.’’ 4 

Our Heavenly Father will not leave mankind 
without the registry of himself and the gracious 
restraints and consolations of his indwelling Spirit. 

A man’s religion is not only the noblest of all his 
impulses and the dearest of all his possessions, but 
the greatest of all realities; for does it not bring him 
to the source of all power back of all force, to the 
fountain of all truth back of all thought—to God 
himself, the final reality back of all verztzes. There- 
fore religion is of necessity the most dynamic of all 
human forces. 


4 History of Rationalism,” by Hurst. (Methodist Book 
Concern.) 


CHAPTER III 


THE COSMIC PRINCIPLE OF LOVE: GOD’S MOTIVE IN 
CREATION AND REDEMPTION 


“In the beginning God created.” . . . “God so loved 
the world.”’—Genesis i. 1; John iit. 16. 


CHAPTER IIT 


THE COSMIC PRINCIPLE OF LOVE: GOD’S 
MOTIVE IN CREATION AND 
REDEMPTION 


RELIGION is God’s noblest gift to the soul of man. 
Its fascinations never wane and its beauties never 
fade. Its wonders ever unfold to the instinct of 
sympathetic inquiry, and by no other process can 
its secrets be truly discovered. In making a study 
of religion in any of its departments there is but one 
safe guide, and that is Realization. Have it, know 
its power, realize its benefits; then follow its leader- 
ship. Who can explain that which he himself does 
not know? Yet he may possess that which he cannot 
explain. He may be the embodiment of life and 
never know why; or he may have his heart filled to 
overflowing with the love of God long before he could 
give to himself, even, an adequate explanation of its 
origin or its laws. In speaking of the origin of spirit- 
ual life, did not our Saviour say: “The wind bloweth 
where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, 
but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it 
goeth; so is every one that is born of the Spirit’? 
Yet who that has ever felt the joy of living, or known 
the thrill of God’s gift of new life, but wishes more 
definite knowledge concerning such blessed experi- 
ences? 

Is not this insatiate desire to know more perfectly 
the source of all real knowledge the basis of science 

(59) 


60 A Gospel for the New Age 


and theology? and is it not this impulse that en- 
ables man to follow the footprints of the Creator 
and think his great thoughts after him? Surely it 
must be pleasing to the Almighty Father to have his 
earthly children to trace out his doings and rejoice 
in his ways, else why endow them with the instinct 
for knowledge, and why such joy in the discovery 
of each new truth? Eternity alone is the limit 
set to the joy of him who would seek to know the 
mysteries of God’s infinite love. 

Why should it be thought strange for the finite 
mind to wish to look into the deep things of God? 
The time has been in the no distant past when such 
a desire was considered by some sacrilegious, since 
the finite mind cannot comprehend the infinite. 
While one may not compass the entire ocean or 
fathom its depths, yet he can dip up a cupful of its 
water and have therein all the essentials of the briny 
deep; just so we may apprehend the goodness of 
God without comprehending his infinite nature. 
On this ground it seems legitimate to seek out those 
principles and know the laws which have to do with 
the soul’s well-being and destiny. 


Gop’s MOTIVE IN CREATION 


May we not with equal propriety seek to discover 
God’s motive in creation and see just why the All- 
wise Creator saw fit to give us existence and why 
he so graciously cares for us day after day? Do 
such secrets lie too deep for human discovery, or 
are they not rather as an open volume which invites 
us to read its pages and rejoice in the discovery of 
its truth? If we approach the subject from the stand- 


The Cosmic Principle of Love 61 


point of human deductions or attempt to “reason 
through nature up to nature’s God,” doubtless such 
secrets would remain forever among the unsolved 
problems. Approached thus, great minds have been 
foiled and the secret of creation remained to them a 
mystery. 

To answer the question of creation in the language 
of the old catechism and say, “‘God made all things 
for his own glory,” is but to waive the question and 
“darken counsel by words without wisdom,” since 
it is no answer at all. In fact, the catechism was 
essentially wrong, since it reversed the order of the 
divine thought. Nowhere can there be found a 
trace of proof that God in all his majestic energies 
ever turns his attention back upon himself. His 
thoughts are never introverted, but ever outward 
and to usward. God is never self-centered and 
divinely egoistic, but always altruistic and divinely 
beneficent. Every expression of his majestic mind is 
in this order, shines forth with this matchless excel- 
lence. 

Nor can we say that God created all things for 
the purpose of self-revelation, as some men would 
have it said, and not go on and say more. This 
would be but a half truth. Surely we dare not think 
of God’s marvelous creation as merely a spectacular 
demonstration, or that the Creator had recourse to 
his wondrous skill in creating only for the gratifica- 
tion of an admiring multitude. Marvelous beauty 
is everywhere displayed: on the earth, in the air, 
in the sky; but all this had hardly the dignity of the 
infinite motive prompting God in all his creative 
might. Men tell us that all material things are but 


62 A Gospel for the New Age 


the “externality of the thought of God’’; that God 
thought about the ‘‘sun,”’ and there it is aglow in the 
heavens; that he thought “stars,” and they came 
forth to twinkle by the myriads. They tell us that 
‘all nature is but a vast loom whose flying shuttles 
are ever busy weaving the garments of God.’’! 
While we thrill over Luther’s apostrophe to a rose, 
“OQ thou immaculate expression of the mind of 
God, surpassing in beauty the skill of finest artist’s 
brush,” yet we are loath to think that wonder of 
structure and beauty of blossom were the only pur- 
pose of God in creating an apple orchard with its 
burden of blossoms, or that beauty of face and grace 
of form constitute the glory of splendid womanhood. 
Nor need we try to think of God as an infinite Idler 
—an inert omnipotence without plan or purpose. 
He is infinite activity, energy, life, freedom! He has 
always been and shall ever be manifesting himself 
everywhere. But self-manifestation is the one es- 
sential of life—to manifest self is, in fact, self-revela- 
tion. But self-revelation is a process, and never till 
we know the purpose back of it can we discover the 
motive of God in creation. Did God create the 
“beauty of the lilies” for his own admiration and 
delight? Or did he paint the matchless glory of the 
sunset sky that we might admire it and say, ‘‘ Behold 
the glory of the Lord’’? God is seen in the sunset, 
to be sure, but why is he there? Is it as the greatest 
of all Artists in the portrayal of the beauties of na- 
ture? or as infinite Intelligence, ‘“‘whose ways are 
past finding out”? What great fact do we gather 
from the creation of nature, of ourselves, and from 


1 James Freeman Clarke. 


The Cosmic Principle of Love 63 


his wonderful Book? Not till these are known can 
we discover God’s purpose in self-revelation or the 
secret of man’s existence and ultimate redemption. 
Is it not that God, who does all this wonderful self- 
revelation, is but making known always and every- 
where the master passion of his nature—namely, 
his marvelous, infinite Love?: 

We are told that “‘God has not left himself with- 
out testimonials in the earth,” and that “‘great 
thoughts belong to him who can keep them.” But 
who are the keepers of God’s great thoughts? His 
thoughts are best seen when woven into the character 
of individual man. When this was accomplished in 
the person of his Son, there was one, the ‘‘ beloved 
disciple,’ who saw it and did not let it slip; and he 
it was who put the great thought in fittest formula 
when he tells us that ‘‘God 7s love.’’ 


THE SECRET OF THE UNIVERSE 


This one great word love tells it all. It was the 
secret of the universe when God began the work 
of creation; it is the secret of his present provident 
administration of affairs; and it is the secret of the 
unwritten, unfolding future. But for Love’s reign 
and administration what could we expect but “‘the 
wreck of matter and the crash of worlds’’? 

God’s essential nature is not expressed by any one 
of his attributes, such as omnipotence or infinite 
wisdom. All these attributes God possessed with an 
added power which controls all. He is primarily, 
essentially, and preéminently love. His justice, 
mercy, and truth are but phases of his love in action. 
His wisdom is omniscient love. His infinite power 


64 A Gospel for the New Age 


is but his love omnipotent. The harmony of his 
being is due to the submission of his other attribute 
to his goodness, mercy, and love. This truth must 
ever be the starting point in all correct conceptions 
of the divine Nature. All others are essentially 
wrong and invariably lead to error. Had an illus- 
trious French reformer? started with love as a first 
principle, he could never have reached the desperate 
conclusions he did. Starting with Omnipotence, or 
the deification of Will, what wonder he landed in the 
“eternal decrees,”’ which included the ‘‘damnation of 
infants,’’ which he himself declares “‘is horrible, but 
I cannot help it.”” His logic was without a flaw, but 
his theology was frightful, all because his starting 
point was vicious in the extreme. Let the major 
premise be “God is love,” and all notions which 
militate against this be rejected, then all theological 
conclusions will be sane, acceptable, beautiful. 
All else is discordant and leads to error. 


LOVE A COSMIC PRINCIPLE 


That we may rejoice the more in the fact that love 
is a cosmic principle and the secret of the universe, 
God’s motive in creation, let us come to a more direct 
study of the laws of love as God’s master passion. 
This we may safely do by considering love as we know 
it to operate in our natures. Love may be defined 
as that principle by which one being seeks and finds 
his own highest good in the well-being of another. 
We have but to consult our own psychic natures to 
determine what love does—how it urges on to noble 
self-expression, to creative expansion in unselfish 





2 John Calvin. 


The Cosmic Principle of Love 65 


service, and how it yearns for the return of its affec- 
tion and devotion. Only upon the premise that love, 
like truth, is the same in all ages and all spheres 
can we reach any adequate conclusions whatever. 
Then, by reasoning from the known to the unknown, 
we may arrive at God’s wonderful love. Of course 
we mean the pure gold of God’s affection freed from 
all sensational dross. Can any more of God’s love 
be revealed than is revealed in our consecrated 
natures? How else could God reveal his infinite 
goodness and love? We know of no other vocabulary 
besides our emotions by which to tell the wonderful 
story of the goodness of God. 


1. An Active Principle 


Love as we know it is an active principle—not a 
dead fossil, but a living power. If this be true in our 
limited human realm, it must be so in God’s un- 
limited and perfect state. In man love may lie 
dormant, waiting for wooing to call it into active 
being—since man is an incomplete, unfolding being; 
but not so with him whose love was ever complete 
and whose powers were always active and never 
needed calling forth. This gracious faculty in God 
has always been an active emotion, and never a 
potential possibility only. Such is God’s love, an 
infinitely perfect emotion reigning in the great 
fatherly heart of God, a faint semblance of which we 
find in our own hearts. 

With this fact in mind, as the first law of love as 
we know it, let us see its application to the nature of 
God. Do we find its principle in force there? Asa 
Being actuated by love, has God always been and 


5 


66 A Gospel for the New Age 


shall he ever be an active power? Imagine, if we 
can, God in the beginning, antedating all creation, 
seated upon his throne in the center of a vast, un- 
peopled universe, with his beams of infinite affection 
streaming out in all directions—in his very essence 
he must love—with never an object upon whom to 
lavish his gracious emotion! Behold him thus from 
all eternity alone, the loneliest Being imaginable, 
while the fragrance of his great heart radiates in 
useless energy throughout empty space with none 
to enjoy its bliss! The very idea is next to the un- 
thinkable. It is unlike God. 

Here we discover God’s incentive and motive in 
creation. The very nature of God required—nay, 
demanded—the whole of creation in order that he 
might have whereon to bestow his heart’s affection. 
From all eternity, therefore, God must have been 
creating; and since he is a Being who changes not, 
to all eternity he must continue his benevolent work. 
To this good day we see that his creative energies 
have not rested. “‘My Father worketh hitherto,” 
said our gracious Lord, ‘‘and I work.” Every vital 
germ, every unfolding flower, every newborn life 
and noblest expression of mind and soul—all living, 
growing, expanding things but attest this wonderful 
truth. A finished creation and crystallized world 
with an exhausted love and defunct Providence 
would be the greatest calamity imaginable. Were 
this the condition of our present world the only path 
left us would be to adjust ourselves to the grim 
fatality and fixed misfortune and let the human race 
die out. Such a state would be the deathblow to 
faith, and life would become a dread nightmare. 


The Cosmic Principle of Love 67 


But a world in which God is still at work—a world 
still becoming, an unfinished universe—is God’s 
opportunity, furnishing him a field for the further 
manifestation of his infinite goodness and love. 
Such a world as this is the workshop of God, the 
hope of humanity, and the ground principle of all 
our Christian religion. Where shall we set the limit 
of God’s creative energy? Shall suns and systems 
tell the wondrous story? In God’s vast domains 
our universe is but a paltry handful on the horizon 
of that realm where God’s love ever holds undisputed 
sway. It is taught in the Vedanta that ‘‘God in 
creation is ever renewing his ancient rapture.” 
Nor was it by mere accident or without purpose said 
of old that “‘God is love,” since love alone is creative, 
dynamic, vital, and, in its very nature, rapturous in 
self-expression. 


2. A Beneficent Principle 


While God’s love is ever an active principle, 
never inert, but always busily producing the objec- 
tives of the divine affection, it is vastly more than 
an indiscriminate source. It is this plus a social 
beneficent element. All love is altruistic. Only 
lust is entirely selfish. ‘‘In its cosmic principle love 
is an infinite open circle in which the currents go 
outward in self-expression and creative energy only 
to return in grateful yielding affection and devo- 
tion.”” While love must create that it may enrich 
and continue to bless, the reciprocal principle of 
love requires the responsive object; so God must 
create recipient creatures. ‘‘Love without affinities 
must die,” and the nature of God required something 


68 A Gospel for the New Age 


higher than lifeless, inanimate objects as the re- 
cipients of his warmth of affection. God’s creative 
skill is wonderfully manifest in the beauty of the 
lilies, in the fire-glow of a polished diamond or the 
sunset sky; but the divine heart could no more be 
satisfied with lavishing love on these inanimate 
objects than the heart of an intelligent woman could 
be satisfied with bestowing her affection upon a 
magnificent doll. 

The Heavenly Father must have fellowship with 
his earthly children and thereby realize spiritual 
affinity. The fact of being infinitely perfect does not 
shut God out from fellowship with his imperfect, 
finite creatures any more that being a man shuts 
one out from fondness for the creatures below him. 
Therefore for the satisfaction of his own nature God 
created living, sentient personalities—spiritual be- 
ings like himself—endowed with the noble faculties 
of intelligence and religion, capable of reciprocating 
in some measure the gift of God’s love. Thus it was 
that in the morning of creation, when seeking a 
model for the fashioning of man’s personality so as 
to meet the cravings of his own nature, he said, 
“Let us make man in our own image’’—and nothing 
short of this would have met the requirements of the 
divine heart. To be a fit recipient of such affection 
man must be in a measure akin to God. This is 
God’s doing, though marvelous in our eyes. 

But man as an integral part of this love-born 
universe must be more than a splendid recipient 
of the divine affection. Even God himself could not 
be satisfied with simply bestowing, enriching, surfeit- 
ing. Love bestowed asks for love in return. God 


The Cosmic Principle of Love 69 


requires the living warmth of a responsive soul, and 
it is when this response is truly and deeply given that 
man rises to his highest estate in religious attain- 
ment. In accomplishing this interrelation God 
himself takes the initiative. He does not wait till 
man has learned how to love him and show himself 
worthy before God’s goodness is bestowed. “He 
-sendeth his rain on the just and on the unjust.” 
It was not man’s accomplished excellence that called 
forth God’s love for a lost world. ‘‘ While we were 
yet sinners, Christ died for us.”” A mother waits not 
for the development of worth or beauty in her babe, 
but lavishes the richness of her fountain of love upon 
her helpless infant. So also with God. Love seeks 
the first avenue of expression and flows freely toward 
the object claiming its care. It is love’s prerogative, 
divine and beautiful, to give that it may awaken a 
like passion latent in the soul, striving to awaken 
in the soul a holy zeal and through this fan to a flame 
the fires of everlasting life. 

As a social principle, love ever seeks to identify it- 
self in blessed companionship with the object of its 
care. Who that truly loves can remain aloof from 
and above all relations with the beloved. Love must 
ever condescend to the level of the object of affec- 
tion or lift that object up to its own plane. This 
our Heavenly Father has so divinely done and will 
continue to do till the end. As Moses patiently 
bore with the Israelites in the desert wanderings, 
‘bearing them in his bosom like a nursing mother,” 
that he might bring them to the land of promise, 
so God has condescended to be patient with erring 
mortals. In thousands of ways unseen his love has 


70 A Gospel for ihe New Age 


emerged, as he has come into human life to guide 
and uphold and to save. Herein was manifest the 
mind of God “in Christ Jesus: who, being in the 
form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with 
God; but made himself of no reputation, and took 
upon him the form of a servant; and was made in 
the likeness of men: . . . and became obedient 
unto death,’’* that he might reveal God and redeem 
sinful man. By coming into intimate relations with 
man, God has revealed the mystery of suffering 
Love. But some will ask: ‘‘How can a perfect 
Being suffer? ’’ 
8. Perfect Love Suffers 


Just here let us pause for a moment. The human 
mind cannot adequately conceive of an abstract 
Essence diffused throughout space. An impersonal 
abstract Deity vanishes from the mental grasp. 
For God to be intelligently thought of, he must step 
out into the open, out of the abstract into the con- 
crete. Here he can be thought of as in action—creat- 
ing, upholding, governing, loving, sympathizing, and 
suffering. ‘These activities all bring God into the 
range of human thought. 

So we ask, How can a perfect personal God exist 
without loving, and how can he love without sym- 
pathizing, which means ‘“‘suffering together’? Ask 
a mother why she suffers with her wayward son, and 
she has but one answer: ‘‘ Why, I am his mother.” 
Her mother love expresses itself in her solicitude, 
anguish, suffering. ‘‘Love would cease to be love 
if it should lose its powers of suffering.’”’ The deeper 


3Philippians ii. 5-8. 


The Cosmic Principle of Love 71 


the love and more refined the nature, the greater the 
capacity of sympathy and the deeper its pangs of 
suffering. Where there is dull indifference to joy or 
sorrow there cannot be true affection. How could 
the Heavenly Father be himself and not enter into 
sympathy with us and suffer for us? As Principal 
Fairbairn has well said: “An infinitely holy being 
can be an infinitely happy being where all besides 
are holy.”’ God must therefore suffer so long as any 
besides are evil. Love and suffering can never be 
divorced. One cannot exist without the other. If 
it be asked why the just must suffer for the unjust, 
the innocent for the gilty, the divine for the human, 
there is but one answer: ‘‘It is the way of love’’; or, 
better still, “It is God’s way.”’ Then again, while 
we may never fathom the depth of the mystery of all 
this, what consolation there is in the fact that God’s 
love reaches to the depth of our suffering, and by his 
sympathizing love makes lighter all the burdens we 
bear! What balm is so sweet to aching hearts as the 
sympathy of love, and what sympathy is so profound 
as God’s? 
4. Love Must Also Serve 

Love not only suffers with the object of affection; 
it must also serve. There can be no love without 
service, or service without love. Slavery, repulsive 
and killing, must ensue if there is enforced obedience 
where love is not. No soul is in its rightful realm 
till it has found means of self-expression in glad, 
loving service. Here are its chief charm and purest 
joy. God the perfect being, infinite in resources, 
could not be content without some method of putting 
himself at the command of his needy mundane chil- 


72 A Gospel for the New Age 


dren. Did he not create us of his own accord that 
he might out of the fullness of his bounty administer 
to our every need? There is no fact more evident 
than this. Of the divine care in loving service to 
man all nature stands in ready proof. Look where 
we will, we cannot but observe its manifestation. 
The shining sun pours down its light beams that it 
may awaken the life forces in earth’s bosom and call 
them forth to joyous service. Every blossom that 
blooms is a message of God’s good will to men told in 
the language of fragrance and beauty and is a prom- 
ise of a richer bounty. Every harvest season yields 
its increase as an evidence of God’s goodness and 
love, awakening “the sweet strains of the corn 
reapers’ song.” Every kindness man shows his 
fellow man is but an expression of that love of God 
which is ever struggling to utter itself in blessing and 
giving itself to every one for whom God cares. 

In no way is the divine service more evident than 
in the provident care and oversight manifested in the 
ordinary sequences of life. There is no portion of 
God’s universe where this care is not rife and none 
too humble to escape his watchful eye. The celestial 
spheres which sweep through space in majestic 
world colonies are no more the objects of his intel- 
ligent care than is the smallest germ that floats un- 
seen in a drop of dew. Throughout God’s vast do- 
main is spread out the ample canopy of his loving 
administration with an energy as fresh and unwast- 
ing as if upon the morning of creation. What fact 
has greater consolation for the troubled heart? 
Every breath he breathes and every heart throb is 
by an energy of the love of God. Whether he walks 


The Cosmic Principle of Love 73 


by day or sleeps at night God’s bivouac never fails; 
and what he is doing for one he is doing for all his 
children in all his dominion. No one can reasonably 
doubt that the world is replete with the evidence of 
God’s loving care for man. All nature is fruitful 
of his benefits. He has made all nature musical to 
_the ear and beautiful to the eye. Instead of burden- 
ing us with want, he has surfeited us with plenty. 
The full tide of his universal goodness flows within 
and around us on every side. In its eternal rounds it 
touches all things with its power. We live and move 
and have our being in the bountiful goodness of God. 
His gracious presence attends our steps and consoles 
our hearts. He hears the prayers of every soul. 

An “absentee divinity,” far removed from the 
sphere of human life and deaf to the heart’s ery, is 
not the God that mortals need and never will satisfy 
the cravings of the soul. It does not suit the mind of 
the age, and is not the kind of a God revealed in the 
Bible. The God of the Scriptures is the immanent 
Being, identifying himself with the world’s struggles 
and hopes, bearing our infirmities and feeling our 
sufferings as only love can. In the far-distant past 
God’s inspired seers beheld in their vision One, the 
fairest among ten thousand, whom they designated 
as ‘‘God’s suffering servant.”’ In the Gospels we 
find him portrayed at full length in all his excellence 
and grace saying, “I am among you as he that 
serveth”’; and in so saying he makes known the 
eternal principle of love, which in the nature of God 
must have made itself known. ‘‘Love necessarily 
impels to service, while service deepens and intensi- 


74. A Gospel for the New Age 


fies love. Service, therefore. is a condition of per- 
petual revelation.” 


§. Love’s Final Triumph, Self-Giving 


God’s plans are ever unfolding toward a final 
triumph. While constantly serving the needy race, 
the blessed Creator has not only been bestowing his 
matchless favors, but has at the same time been 
moving steadily forward to the culmination of an 
ultimate purpose—namely, the triumph of his in- 
. finite love in complete self-giving. Genuine love can 
never be satisfied short of the complete gift of self. 
Love must give—must give grandly, must give all. 
It has always done thus. Hence the infinite love of 
God could not stop till the supreme sacrifice has 
been made. This as the law of love is manifestly 
cosmic, not only reaching down into the realm of 
finite human affairs and reigning there, but it sweeps 
up into the abode of the Eternal and takes in the 
infinite love of God. The gift of self to the utmost 
possibility is the very soul of perfect love. All true 
sacrifice is made plain here, as well as all real great- 
ness of soul and life. The patriot finds his path to 
glory and to the hearts of his people only as he sur- 
renders himself unreservedly to the call of his coun- 
try. The mother is never more divine than when, 
in total self-forgetfulness, she immolates herself 
upon the altar of service for those she loves; nor is 
the father ever more noble and supreme than when 
enshrined in the hearts of them that are his, and 
garlanded by those for whom he would gladly lay 
down his life. This same principle wrought out to 
its fullness opens up to men the noblest vistas of 


The Cosmic Principle of Love 75 


truth and illumines also many of life’s darkest 
problems, as well as reveals the wonderful heart of 
God. Herein is discovered that impulse of the 
divine Self which found expression in that undying 
sentence: ‘‘God so loved the world, that he gave his 
only-begotten Son, that whosoever believed in him 
should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ 

In all its majestic beauty God’s love could not 
have been satisfied short of the supreme gift; other- 
wise it would have failed in the hour of trial and 
missed the ultimate triumph of its own purpose. 
Up to this crisis of imparting the very best in the 
divine nature to a lost and ruined world, all the 
processes of revelation have pointed since the world 
began; and to that one fact all the wonders of human 
redemption have slowly but surely tended through 
the ages and came to flower and final triumph at 
Gethsemane. The cross is the secret of all God’s 
culminating purposes and the highest unfolding 
of infinite love. Toward this one event all prophetic 
truth converged, and from it all light radiates. 
This is that “far-off divine event to which the whole 
creation moved.” ‘There could be no other—the 
efflorescence of the majestic love of the Father and 
the completion of that redemptive plan which had 
been inwrought in the very nature of God from the 
beginning. In that crucial hour, the darkest that 
ever dawned, the beams of eternal light burst from 
the dungeon of night and flooded the world with 
morning forever! Nor shall its glory ever wane. 
Then it was that incarnate Love, mightier than all 
opposing powers, surmounting all difficulties and, 
struggling through the darkness, placed upon the 


76 A Gospel for the New Age 


altar of eternity the incomparable sacrifice, the 
unspeakable Gift! Here was the supreme triumph 
of love in sacrificing the divine best for fallen man! 

To the great expounder of the faith, the apostle 
Paul, this was the climax of all revelation, the sure 
evidence of the unfailing love of God. Said he: 
“If God spared not his only Son, but offered him 
up for us all, will he not with him freely give us all 
things?”’ Having made the greatest gift, God could 
not withhold the lesser. God’s doings are himself 
expressed; and he must ever be true to himself. 
To have wavered or failed in the eternal proffer of 
grace would have been to abandon the very first 
principles of his own being. It was infinite love that 
gripped the heart of the Son of God and “con- 
strained” him to utmost obedience to the Father’s 
will. ‘My meat and my drink,” he said, “‘is to do 
the will of him that sent me.’’ That “will” bore 
him on to the offering of himself in obedience to 
that cosmic principle of love which refuses to be 
content short of the utmost that love can give. 
When has there been conceived a sublimer plan for 
setting forth the infinite love of God?—bodying 
it forth in the form of divine Personality. ‘‘Greater 
love hath no man than this, that a man lay down 
his life for his friends.’”? Anything short of this would 
not have been a true revelation or have demon- 
strated God’s absolute fidelity to the principles of 
his nature. This was God’s sublime triumph of self- 
giving in love. Beyond this omnipotence cannot go. 
To have done less would have been unlike God; 
to have done more were an impossibility. 

All the marvels of God’s revelation of himself 


The Cosmic Principle of Love 77 


find expression just here. It was all love’s tender 
enactment—love the fountainhead of mercy, the 
essence of truth, and the soul of righteousness. 
This vitalizing, sympathizing, suffering, and serving 
love of God has been supreme in the doings of Jeho- 
vah in all ages. It has lived and breathed in the 
Father’s heart from all eternity; hence “Christ 
must have come into the world as the revealer of the 
divine love, even though sin had never entered to 
separate man from his Maker.’’4 

Such is the stream of love flowing from the in- 
finite heart of God. With this light in the heavens 
to make our path plain and beautify life forever, 
may we not go forth rejoicing to study her mysteries 
and discover her laws to obey them? With this 
light we proceed with our further studies of the reali- 
ties of the Christian religion. 


4“*Epistles of St. John,” by Westcott. (Macmillan Co.) 


Ve ie ae. 





CHAPTER IV 


GOD’S WORLD PLAN AS REVEALED BY OUR LORD 
JESUS CHRIST 


“‘A belief that a divine power governs the universe, that 
all miscellaneous and unexplicable happenings will be gathered 
up into a smooth and ultimate perfection, gives faith, comfort, 
and consolation. . . . On a large scale, from a cosmic 
rather than from a personal point of view, an individual who 
is gifted in a large and charitable faith in the future of man- 
kind, is secured and sustained by the feeling that he is a part 
of that procession which is headed toward ‘that far-off divine 
event to which the whole creation moves.’ ”’—‘*‘ Human Traits,”’ 
Irwin Edman. 


CHAPTER IV 


GOD’S WORLD PLAN AS REVEALED BY OUR 
LORD JESUS CHRIST 


MAN’s best interests and highest achievements 
are always to be found when in harmony with the 
realm in which he lives. To toil on clashing with the 
laws of the universe would be unwise. So it behooves 
us to learn the condition under which we are to live. 

Has God a definite world plan? Did he in the 
beginning think things through and adopt a scheme 
by which he made all things and still governs the 
universe? Now, it can plainly be seen that he did 
establish such a system in the material world, dis- 
covered by the study of science and known as “‘the 
laws of nature.”’ But is there such a plan in the 
moral world as it has to do with man? To say that 
there is not would be to leave the issues of life to the 
caprices of chance. 

If God has a world plan, what is its nature? 
Does it make for the triumph of right and truth, or 
does it leave the issues of life entirely uncertain? 
Various opinions are held touching this momentous 
question. Some are hopeless enough to think that 
the future is altogether dark and only grim disaster 
awaits, while others with equal tenacity hold to a 
more optimistic view. Others still contend that 
since it is man’s prerogative to choose good or evil, 
thus determining his own life, the character of the 
future is altogether uncertain. Besides this, there 


6 (81) 


82 A Gospel for the New Age 


are good and pious people who believe that the world 
has been bad from the beginning and is likely so to 
continue to the end. They believe that, since the 
present life is evil, it is the highest duty of a Christian 
to hold himself aloof from the world, and that ‘‘the 
happiest day of a man’s life is the day of his death.” 
This ascetic idea of life is back of all monastic in- 
stitutions; but is it Christian? 

At this stage of modern life, which many liken to 
‘a carnival of crime,” some serious people are ask- 
ing: “‘Is life, with all its burdens of care and its 
uncertainties, worth the living?” Others are ask- 
ing: “What has gone wrong withthe world? HasGod 
forgotten us? If so, what is to become of the world?” 
There are others who take the gloomiest possible 
view of the world’s future. They believe evil to be 
in the ascendancy, and that it has always been so; 
that there can be no ultimate hope for humanity. 
Nothing could be more gloomy than the picture of 
the universe as modern materialism presents it, 
Bertrand Russell being witness. ‘‘Purposeless and 
void of meaning,” he says, “‘is the world which 
science reveals for our belief. . . . That manisa 
product of causes which have no prevision of the 
ends they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, 
his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the 
outcome of accidental collocations; that no fire, no 
heroism, no intensity of thought or feeling can 
preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that 
all the labors of the ages, all devotion, all aspiration, 
all the noonday brightness of human genius, are 
destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar 
system, and the whole temple of man’s achieve- 


God’s World Plan as Revealed by Our Lord 88 


ments must inevitably be buried beneath the débris 
of universal ruin. All this, if not quite beyond 
dispute, is yet so nearly certain that no philosopher 
who rejects it can hope to stand.” To such a soulless 
science the present world is a “colossal Sodom and 
Gomorrah, where a foul egoism ever breeds the 
speedier woe and disaster, and the fire and brimstone 
which swept the cities of the plains from the earth 
are to be regarded as angels of mercy and types of the 
whirlwind which shall roll all human distresses into 
the peace of extinction.” 

This may be considered as the very worst possible 
view of life. If this be true, we may wonder if this 
life were not a kind of ‘‘Limbo” imposed upon us 
for some mysterious reason, if not a drama enacted 
for the delight of some fiend of deity. Even if we 
personally, largely through accident of circumstances, 
happen to be successful, “our joy is a vulgar glee, 
not unlike the snicker of any rogue at his success.” 
Unless against this dark view of life some reassuring 
faith arise, life would become unbearable. In ex- 
treme cases it has driven men to suicide. 

While the average man may not accept the op- 
timist’s conception of life, that this is the very best 
possible world, and while realizing that much in the 
world is going wrong, yet “‘he does feel vaguely 
assured that the nature of things is ordered, harmoni- 
ous, dependable, and regular, and affairs, cosmically 
considered, are in a sound state. He feels a vast and 
comfortable solidity about the whole of things in 
which his life is set. He can depend upon the familiar 
rising and setting of the sun, the recurrent and 
assured movements of the seasons. Were this trust 


84. A Gospel for the New Age 


suddenly removed, were the cosmic guarantee with- 
drawn, to live would be one prolonged terror.” 
It is what follows when men reach such gloomy con- 
clusions that is of interest to the religious or scientific 
world. When men settle down to systematic pessim- 
ism socially and commercially, what wonder that 
the world is caught in a vast crime wave? “‘Asaman 
thinketh in his heart, so is he,” and out of this 
fountain flows the life he may live. 


THE EGOIST’S WORLD 


But what of that popular theory which holds that 
life at present is bad; that it originated in the jungle 
and is a struggle between individuals; that there is 
an invisible force at work in the world forcing man- 
kind onward into a far-distant, better state where 
life will be worth living? Now, the only difference 
between this and the pessimist’s bad world lies in 
the optimistic guess as to what the future will bring 
forth. In both the present seems bad enough. When 
brought to a norm the teachings of the evolutionist 
can be expressed in these words: “‘ Realize thyself” — 
do your best, worst, reach your goal, whatever that 
may be. Here we find the embodiment of the egoist, 
the most dissatisfied, if not the most wretched, 
person in the world; and he concludes that life is all 
misery. This seems to be the normal condition of 
the person of the world who lives for self only. 
Unfortunately this state of discontent seems to be 
the natural product of our non-Christian democ- 
racies, which exalt the individual self and enthrone 
the will. This brings on a deadly clash of kindred 
spirits and arrays strength against strength, making 


God’s World Plan as Revealed by Our Lord 85 


it possible for the strong to trample down the weak, 
producing exactly the jungle condition where reigns 
the ‘red law of tooth and claw’—which is seen 
modernized in competitive commerce. This spirit 
is as old as human selfishness and greed. It sends 
the helpless to the bottom of the sea, sees millions 
die of starvation, while the poor are crushed by 
merciless money trusts. It calls all such ‘‘the use- 
less element of society,”’ the overproduct of ‘“ram- 
pant animalism.” To the egoist success is the 
mastery in life’s bitter struggle for existence. Thus 
the ‘‘fittest’”’ is always the strongest, the most 
cunning or daring and unprincipled. To them alone 
they count life worth living, but to the rest life is a 
calamity; and to be dead is to be out of the way of 
the strong. The law of the “survival of the fittest” 
may pertain in the realm of plants and brutes, and 
some men want to apply it to human life. But is 
this law of the savage and the brute God’s world plan 
as taught us by Jesus Christ? 


THE Two LAWS OF NATURE 


The modern man, as he is pleased to be called, 
must have discovered that while ‘‘the laws of nature 
are the laws of God” there is more than one set of 
the laws of nature. In his scientific studies he must 
have discovered that God has a code of laws appli- 
cable to the material realm and are seen at work in the 
forces of nature such as electricity, gravitation, and 
in chemical action. But God has also another set of 
laws, which apply only to the moral realm and 
social life of man. In the one set of laws is seen the 
law of force as applied to inanimate and unmoral 


86 A Gospel for the New Age 


objects; while in the other is seen the law of love 
as applied to personality. God does not govern the 
moral world by material laws. God is the “‘absolute 
habit of love,’’ while man is the creature of that law, 
and all his life comes under its dominion. Love 

brought man into existence; it awakens his powers; 
— it conserves his interests and points the way to his 
highest achievements. It lifts him above brute- 
hood; it pushes the soul into prominence and ac- 
centuates the moral worth of man. 

That the strong should help the weak is an epitome 
of the world plan of God in dealing with man. With 
God this is a law. It was this law in the nature of 
God that caused him to reveal himself, to come into 
actual fellowship with man, as set forth in the 
Gospels, in the life of our Lord, and in the teachings 
of the apostles. This law of love stands as a su- 
preme protest against the harsh theory of the ‘‘sur- 
vival of the fittest’? when applied to human nature. 
While the scientist must look down to the material 
realm for instances in proof of his brutal theory, 
love looks up to Christ as an example of the ‘‘more 
excellent way.” Christ’s labors were never egoistic, 
never put forth in trampling down others and 
triumphing over them; but they were always in 
behalf of the weak and needy—in divine solicitude 
for others. The cross stands as a symbol of love’s 
supreme gift, and in direct antagonism to the ethics 
of the jungle, glorified in international strife and 
militarism. 

CHRIST CONFIDENT HERE 


In nothing was Christ more confident than in the 
ultimate triumph of God’s world plan as set forth 


God’s World Plan as Revealed by Our Lord 87 


by himself. He came to earth to reveal this plan. 
Said he: “I speak not of myself. . . . My meat 
and my drink is to do the will of him that sent me.” 
“‘Thy will be be done” was his supreme declaration. 

This sublime confidence of success rested upon 
three basal facts: (1) He recognized the will of God 
- in all the sequences of life. He believed that there 
was a purpose at the heart of the universe, working 
slowly, constantly, and persistently to one great 
end. But this will with him was not a blind force, 
titanic and unmoral and cruel in the extreme, 
but the expression of the energy of love. This 
thought came beautifully to florescence in the say- 
ing, ““My Father worketh hitherto, and I work” 
—said in connection with his Sabbath works of 
mercy. All the future lay in the will of the Father 
and could be only bright. (2) He also believed in 
man, and upon this faith his confidence further 
emerges. He was interested and invested himself 
in humanity as a whole, and not in one class of men 
as arrayed against another. Out of this humanity, 
including the downtrodden and the despised “‘ pub- 
licans,”’ his kingdom was to be built, rich in possi- 
bilities to glorify God. The unsaved were not out- 
casts to be shunned, but were “lost sheep,” straying 
children to ba sought and kissed back into the father’s 
embrace. With social customs all against him, 
Jesus treated men as the sons of God, and his con- 
fidence reached the lowest in unholy living. He saw 
in them the submerged image of God. To this he 
appealed, and in the outcome of such men in all ages 
his wisdom finds ample justification. Who besides 
him has thus viewed and treated men and so bene- 


88 A Gospel for the New Age 


fited them? The miracle of this confidence has never 
ceased. His confiding love still makes bad men good. 
He believed in and trusted men, and to this day they 
prove true to him and will die for him and his cause. 
(8) The third basis of Jesus’s confidence of triumph 
was his ideal of life. With him life was not simply 
meat and drink: “A man’s life consisteth not in the 
abundance of the things that he hath.’”’ Beneath the 
wreckage and ruin of every life there is a real self 
to which, forsooth, he may be awakened. He did 
not ignore the black shadow of sin, nor yield to the 
gloomy pessimism of his day; but he illumined the 
darkness of humanity with the light of a divine 
purpose, and thus made the evidence of despair to 
become the element of hope. ‘Offenses must come.” 
Life must have its conflicts, its trials and temptations, 
or victory were not possible. His death must needs 
be. “It is expedient for you that I go away’— 
without it redemption could not be achieved. He 
did not regard man as the sport of fate, but the 
object of divine love. The very power which con- 
strained him to the death on the cross holds all true 
souls firm to life’s duties. The way to the cross was 
the path to the higher life, the perfection of being. 
Out of the “baptism of fire’? would come the trans- 
figuration of soul. The Sermon on the Mount is the 
measure of Jesus’s conception of God’s world plan, 
and in its gradual fulfillment his justification is yet 
being accomplished. 


SELF-GIVING IN LOVE 


The grace of self-giving is not only the highest 
moral act of God, but is the very soul of his-plans as 


God’s World Plan as Revealed by Our Lord 89 


revealed in Christ. This self-renunciation does not. 
mean suicide, but rather the redemption and uplift 
of mankind. On this platform Christ would at- 
tempt a conquest of the world, and only in the light 
of this principle can we interpret his religion—a re- 
ligion of love and service into which he calls all men 
to enlist. 

Sacrifice at its best is the supreme act of love— 
and this in self-giving for the good of others. It is 
God manifesting the purest principle of his nature. 
All the world is full of the manifestation of this law. 
Its way is the path of service. Minerals must dis- 
integrate and lose their identity to be taken up and 
become food for plants. In their turn plants are 
crushed and dissolved, to be taken up by animal 
life. Again animal life must yield and become food 
for man, thus becoming a stimulus for the spiritual 
life. 

Now all this, from the standpoint of unthinking 
selfishness, may seem a manifestation of nature’s 
cruelty and may appear like one degree of life 
preying upon another; but only one link of the chain 
is seen at a time. For this subservient purpose all 
degrees of life were created, and by this self-abnega- 
tion their destiny is fulfilled. But for this same self- 
giving how could material substances ever be woven 
into the matchless beauty of blossom or the wealth of 
fruitage? How could plant and animal life ever 
reach the high dignity of serving human life and 
become the setting for sparkling thought and im- 
mortal spirit? Man in his order, also in harmony 
with creation’s plans, must forego self and ease and 
consent to ‘‘become a sacrifice for others” to ac- 


90 A Gospel for the New Age 


complish his destiny in life. He, too, must surrender 
his hold upon the lower degree of life in order to 
become honored and glorified in the more exalted 
kingdom. This is the philosophy of our Saviour’s 
teachings when he said: “‘Whosoever will save his 
life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for 
- my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.’’ 
This paradox is the very gateway to eternal life. 


WHERE ETERNAL CROWNS ARE WON 


Nowhere in the study of our Lord’s teachings do 
we discover that, in offering his disciples eternal 
life, he ever promised them exemption from hard- 
ships, trials, and temptations. Nor do any of his 
apostles promise such exemption. The Lord taught 
his disciples to pray, ‘‘ Lead us not into temptation”’; 
but this prayer was neither an implication that God 
would foolishly lead us into temptation or that he 
could be induced to lift mankind above all such 
trying ordeals and thereby out of all responsibility. 
This great prayer was a petition for divine tuition 
and guidance for the soul in its sovereignty. It was 
a prayer that the soul might prefer the more ex- 
cellent way, might avoid all impurity and maintain 
that frame of mind which abhors the evil and cleaves 
to the good. While it is not in keeping with God’s 
plans to exempt mankind from all trial tests, it is the 
glory of man to steer clear of disaster and avoid all 
disgrace. To develop an instinct for the detection 
of evil, and to shun it, is the finest shade of Christian 
character. Our place is in a world fraught with 
evil. Here our Father has allotted us to be born; 
here man is expected to win his glory; and our re- 


God’s World Plan as Revealed by Our Lord 91 


deeming Lord would not take us out of such a world. 
In his famous prayer for his disciples he said: “I 
pray not that thou shouldest take them from the 
world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the 
evil one’”’'—from being overcome by him. To be in 
a world where evil exists is one thing; but to be over- 
- come by it is quite another. To wage a constant 
warfare against sin is heroic, is Christlike. Such a 
world is the arena of victory; here eternal crowns are 
won! To equip a soul for such a strife, to make it 
sin*proof, with tastes for good and a will to do right 
at all hazards—this is to make it godlike, is what 
Christianity means to accomplish in her schools for 
sainthood. 

Our Lord dealt with this question in a way that 
would clearly indicate that such a world condition 
is in exact keeping with the divine world plan. He 
who came to reveal God’s will did not himself con- 
demn it or seek to escape it, as did the medieval 
monks. It has always been true that in the con- 
flicts of life, in great tribulations, the noblest char- 
acters have been developed. In all human life we 
develop strength by exercise and greatness in strife. 
But for the Egyptian captivity and the forty years 
in the wilderness, the world would not have had a 
Moses, civilization’s greatest emancipator and law- 
giver. Without such conflicts history would have 
been without a Pericles or a Charlemagne, a Crom- 
well or a Washington, a Foch or a Woodrow Wilson. 
But for the trials which fretted the souls of our 
mothers and tried their patience we could never have 
known those beautiful shades of excellence which 


‘John xvii. 15. 





92 A Gospel for the New Age 


glow like diamonds in their character. Without this 
conflict there could be no probation, no joy of being 
right, no glory of a final triumph. Such a world is 
God’s training ground for souls where sovereignty 
of soul is developed and immortal heroes are made, 
fashioned after the image of God. Think of Thomas 
A. Edison experimenting with eighteen hundred 
different chemicals in developing his X-ray pho- 
tography! Or of an author like Gibbon spending 
twenty years of the cream of his life in writing one 
history, “The Decline and Fall of the Roman 
Empire’! Is there any wonder that it lives? Just 
this patient struggling against difficulties brings out 
those characters which are the glory of any country, 
and with whom even God himself might be pleased— 
for do they not think his great thoughts after him and 
make them glow for the rest of mankind? Triumph- 
ing in this age-long struggle lets the world grow 
better and our age to eclipse all others and our 
approach to personality to be the trophy of our 
times. Thus it is that 


“through the ages one increasing purpose runs, 
_ And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the 
suns.” 


All this is accomplished not without man’s co- 
operation, but with it and through his agency. Some 
may have thought otherwise; but fatalism accom- 
plishes nothing in the moral and religious life of man. 
He has his struggles and triumphs because he has a 
will to obey and trust to the grace of a higher power. 

This conflict between good and evil is not a limited 
something to be experienced and be rid of; but must 


God’s World Plan as Revealed by Our Lord 93 


be fought to a finish either by the unaided powers 
of human will or by the assistance of divine help. 
Men and nations have attempted the conquest by 
various methods. The melancholy story of man’s 
unaided efforts to resist the impulses of evil is as 
widely known as the existence of evil itself. The 
‘record is the same whether written upon the cave 
temples of India, or in the marble poetry of Greece, 
or in the splendid ruins of world-conquering Rome, or 
in the wild leap into the dark unknown by men who 
seek to escape from the “‘demon thought” by suicide. 
Everywhere and in all languages the verdict is the 
same in the struggle for mastery over evil by human 
strength alone. It is always, “‘ Vanity of vanities; 
all is vanity.” 

By the Christian, however, the conflict is waged 
under a sky radiant with hope. ‘He sees the victory 
from afar; by faith he brings it nigh.” Well he 
knows that he cannot win the victory except by the 
aid of proffered grace. With this his triumph is sure. 
It is this “hope set before” in all God’s world plans 
that buoys the soul and conquers sorrow—‘“ gives 
even affliction a grace and reconciles man to his lot.” 
Jacob’s fourteen years of bond service were to him 
but as a few days, considering the love he bore for 
his beloved Rachel. It is the end sought that robs 
life’s burdens of their weight and gives sacrifice its 
halo of glory. When the love of God is warm in the 
heart, then his will is a pleasure and service a delight. 
Thus it is that love illumines sorrow and makes even 
suffering blessed. The promise of greater things is 
written across the face of disaster, and no amount of 
evil prophecy or weapons of destruction can finally 


94 A Gospel for the New Age 


defeat life’s ends if they are in harmony with God’s 
great world plans at work in every soul codperating 
with God. The career of Jesus, who refused the 
lure of wealth, fame, and a crown, led at last to the 
cross, it is true; but that career illumined the path- 
way of life with a light which has never gone out 
and culminated in the resurrection and the redemp- 
tion of the race. Had there been no night in his life, 
there could have been no glorious dawn. With no 
“‘becoming as a servant and obedient unto death,” 
there had been no crowning and seating at the 
right hand of the Father. 


THE JUDICIAL PROCESS 


Since this conflict means a final triumph for the 
soul or for the world, there must be room for the 
severest judicial action with full codperation of the 
soul and the nation. Flowery beds of ease have 
never yet carried one to the skies. The judicial 
process is at the heart of all human life. To exact 
obedience and award the worthy is but the utmost 
kindness—‘“‘the austere benignity of the moral 
order.” In the midst of it all there must be the 
process of illumination. Moral excellence is never 
self-sustaining. The conscience needs instruction; 
otherwise its verdicts would often be mere traditions 
or prejudices, if not rankest bigotry. The overthrow 
of ignorance will require effort and unfailing vig- 
ilance. 

Into the realm of light, love, and truth for the 
noble mastery of life’s problems, men are led, are 
wooed, and are driven. This “double inducement,” 
punishment and reward, is present in every crisis 


God’s World Plan as Revealed by Our Lord 95 


of life. Of old it was said: “ Behold, I set before you 
this day a blessing and a curse; a blessing, if ye obey; 

a curse, if you will not obey.’ This is the 
ancient law, as old as the moral nature of man— 
truth and error, right and wrong, meeting in life- 
and-death conflict. 

This life is God’s arena for moral triumph, and 
the war is ever on. All history is but an epic of the 
heroic conflict. In the past it was, Shall Sparta or 
Athens go down, Carthage or Rome, the old Empire 
or the new prophetic nations that shall swarm in 
upon it? Shall it be the French or the English who 
shall possess the new America? Shall the Kaiser or 
the Spirit of Liberty control the destiny of nations? 
To-day it is, Shall it be Christ of Belial, the Spirit 
or the brute, that shall fling out the flag of the future, 
the soul or Satan, to perish or to live forever? 

Such is the spirit which is ever sounding the tocsin, 
calling to the conflict true souls upon whom hang the 
destinies of men and nations—men whom the world 
is waiting to crown with its laurels. Shall we of 
to-day, under the spell of Taoism, lie prone in 
lethargy and wait for Nature to accomplish it all; 
or hark the call of Christ, the call of God from 
eternity, and leap to the conflict and win the victory 
for truth and native land? This call of God is in 
every holy impulse, every high and noble aspiration, 
every verdict for the right; and nothing contributes 
more to the enlargement of individual life than a 
heroic and cheerful response to this call. God’s 
hosts for the right are an army of volunteers, and 
they know true bravery. 


“Deuteronomy xi. 26-28. 


96 A Gospel for the New Age 


BUILDING PERSONALITY 


In this éribulation® of life, with its sufferings and 
victories, it is not the design of the Father to sup- 
press personality, but to unfold and build it up and 
perfect it. While we are ‘‘called to be conformed to 
the image of his Son,”’ thereby being in harmony 
with the divine plan, even this is not intended to 
blot out our wills or suppress our personality. Even 
if it were possible in the lifelong struggle of bringing 
our wills into harmony with the divine will to school 
the soul into silent subjection and eternal passivity 
to the will of God, even this would answer none of 
the designs of God in our spiritual education in the 
school of Christ. Nor is it perfection to be absorbed 
into the infinite Brahma, lost in Infinite Bliss, or 
schooled into harmless dullness or eternal inefficiency. 
The purpose of an educational institution with its 
classroom work and its field athletics is no more 
intended to develop the physical and mental powers 
of the student than it is the design of the Creator, 
by this school of adversity, to build up personality 
by awakening the intellect, stimulating the sensibil- 
ities and conscience, and establishing the sovereignty 
of the will—all of which combine to clothe man 
with the nobility of existence. Instead of reducing 
and destroying our native wholeness, the design of 
the Heavenly Father is to fill it out, to complete and 
glorify it. After raising man up out of sin, which is 
always a grievous burden, God sets him on a higher 
plane of choice and liberty where will is in harmony 
with reason, there to be empowered as sons and 
coworkers with himself in vast world enterprises, as 


38Tribulum, to separate the wheat from the chaff. 


God’s World Plan as Revealed by Our Lord 97 


through us as willing instruments he accomplishes 
his majestic schemes in human redemption and 
world progress. 

The supreme task in the building up of personality 
is to bring mankind to the highest plane of living— 
to the development of spirituality and full soul 
harmony with God, to “the perfect manhood in 
Christ Jesus.””’ This we know can be accomplished 
in a variety of ways; so that while men are created 
with the widest possibility of individuality, this 
godlikeness may be attained in them each without 
harming their personality. God suits his methods 
to the needs of each. What would aid the learned 
might be useless to the unlearned, and “‘trials” to 
the poor would be of no avail to the rich. Yet they 
are in the hands of the same eternal, man-educating, 
soul-redeeming, and loving Heavenly Father. The 
paramount duty of each is, therefore, to strive to 
bring himself and help to bring all others into the 
likeness of God and into glad harmony with him. 
The highest attainment in holiness of life is to realize 
this finished personality. When this has been ac- 
complished man has a mind that can apprehend and 
seize the thoughts of God and send them broadcast 
to the enriching of the world’s thought; he has a will 
that responds to the divine will in the sovereignty 
of its choice; and he has a conscience which reflects 
the rectitude of the divine nature in all moral re- 
lations and keeps pure the stream of love flowing 
fresh from the fountain of the heart. But what is 
all this but to have the Soul enthroned? 

The highest gladness is reached by man when he 
finds his will merged into the righteous, loving will 

7 


98 A Gospel for the New Age 


of God; and when, also, without hesitation, his own 
spirit responds joyfully to the promptings of the 
Holy Spirit. This, indeed, is all God’s planning as 
seen in Christ Jesus; and in this great scheme God 
would include the whole world. 

The joy of the Christian life is in large measure the 
sense of personal enlargement found in a plan which 
comprehends the whole world. He who has found 
the harmony of such a plan is surprised at the 
breadth of his being. He has not lost himself in the 
vastness of life, but has found himself, and in reality 
only begun to live. What a wonderful new sense of 
freedom there is in this fullness, this living life and 
deep confidence of power! The great surprise is 
that God could make so much out of materials so 
ordinary. The greatest outcome of our struggles will 
be with us as it was with Jacob—namely, the de- 
velopment of power by which we prevail with God 
and with men. It is the relation of all true saints 
that they have a princely rank. “God is never 
jealous of the power of his people. He lets them 
come and wrestle that they may be strong. He calls 
such into the gate that they may be intercessors for 
him as tried and true leaders of the people.” 

Just this is the character that is needed for to-day. 
For such a type the world is waiting to make our 
troubled age the greatest era in the world’s history. 
But, before God can accomplish the designs in his 
world plan in us, the clamor for exemption from 
trials and hardships must give place to a heroic life 
of faith and enlarged Christian personality. ‘‘God 
is ever watching the process with us, and varying 
the discipline best to mold us unto himself, that 


God’s World Plan as Revealed by Our Lord °99 


nothing be lacking to the completeness of the happy 
result of the trial. So if we complain of the tempta- 
tions of life, charging our failures to the severity of 
the trials, then how clear it is that character can be 
fortified and finished in us only by such trials.’’4 
' Is not a soul on trial for the perfection of character 
in reality a candidate for heavier trials? No temp- 
tations are ever too great, unless we make them so 
by yielding when we should have resisted unto 
victory. 

In all this moral conflict the warrior needs not 
battle alone. His Captain is ever at his side; and in 
all the campaigns of life they go together. Wander- 
ing perplexed in the wilderness of ideas and passions, 
this Champion will ever appear, and in the depths of 
the labyrinth his glance will indicate the way. In 
all the grievous sacrifices of life the warrior not only 
has the companionship of his Lord, but his example 
as well. We have a great Saviour because he en- 
dured great hardships and resisted great temptations. 
The trials of life are but great battle fields; and just 
here it is that God honors us by calling us to be heroes 
and by waiting to crown us victors. 


THE INDIVIDUAL TRIUMPH 


Not the multitude, but the man, is the object of 
God’s watchfulness. One of the mysteries of history 
is the loneliness of Jesus. In all the great crises of 
his life no man stood with him. In the temple as a 
lad, in the wilderness temptations, in the garden, 
before Pilate, and on the cross he was alone. Verily 
“‘he trod the winepress alone.”” By himself he fought 


4“Sermons,”’ Bushnell. (Charles Scribner’s Sens.) 


100 A Gospel for the New Age 


the battles of life and could therefore say, “‘Be of 
good cheer; I have overcome the world.” As an 
individual he won life’s greatest crown. 

At the center of God’s great plans stands, not the 
race, nor the nation, but the individual. There is 
no such thing as “herd morality” in the divine 
economy. While man is a social being and his life 
must touch other lives, he cannot submerge his 
individuality into the multitude and escape in- 
dividual responsibility. While man has his obliga- 
tion to his clan, to society, or to the nation, this 
obligation grows out of individual duty. The re- 
newal of society always grows out of individual re- 
generation. ‘‘The social hope is always the best 
sign of individual renewal,” and without his better- 
ment the social hope could not exist. There are 
what are called the “sins of society,” and rightly, 
yet every sin committed is by an individual, and 
only the individual can be held to moral account- 
ability. Society is what the combined influence of 
the individuals makes it. A composite social con- 
science would be a curiosity. Every man must 
answer for himself to God. 

It has been said of Bunyan’s pilgrims that ‘‘Chris- 
tiana’”’ was a truer Christian than her husband be- 
cause she took her children with her. But ‘‘Chris- 
tian” was true first to himself, to his own conscience 
and individual responsibility. Though all others 
should fail to start for heaven, he could not thereby 
be exempt. Men need to keep a level head just here. 
In this day of rigid solidarity, designing men want 
to hide behind the multitude, the corporation, or 
society. State laws are sometimes enacted to shield 


God’s World Plan as Revealed by Our Lord 101 


the individual; but God, who holds the scales of 
justice, is not swayed by the crowd or fettered by 
State laws or corporation compacts. Souls are never 
condemned or saved in the compact. All worth of 
human character is founded upon the human unit, 
and here all moral accountability rests. Instead of 
being shielded by the compact, the individual mem- 
ber is responsible for its ‘‘sins” just to the extent to 
which he gives his consent or expresses his dissent 
from its doings. The mere fact of keeping silent 
makes every member particeps criminis in all trans- 
actions of the compact of which he is a constituent. 
There is danger of carrying the “‘social obligation”’ 
too far. Perhaps the greatest offense committed 
by the old theology was in holding the individual to 
moral account for the sins of the “federal head of 
the race.” This was resented as an injustice to 
the innocent and helpless individual, and as such it 
could not be thought of as the doings of a just and 
merciful Heavenly Father. The innocent and help- 
less do suffer because of the sins of others incurring 
the righteous wrath of all right-minded people. 
But punished as guilty they are not and cannot be. 
Many do suffer from the “sins of society,” but the 
guilty ones are they who commit the sins and only 
they. Man’s social obligation lies in the investment 
of his influence for the social betterment. Men 
cannot withdraw themselves into a castle of safety 
and let the rest go to destruction. The world is fast 
coming to recognize that individual salvation ulti- 
mately depends upon the social redemption. He 
cannot repudiate this and call himself a true Chris- 


102 A Gospel for the New Age 


tian. To love God means to love all God’s children, 
all for whom Christ died. 


THE VISION SPLENDID 


In the great world plans of God the individual is 
not only bound up with the world as he touches it 
to-day, but the fruit of his fidelity and faith may 
come to harvest in the far-distant future, thus 
affecting people yet unborn. Not only are thunder 
tones heard in the far distance, but by means of the 
radio the human voice and music have been heard 
half around the world. Life is not lived for to-day 
only. Centuries hence will reap the harvest of deeds 
that were deemed as “‘fragrance wasted on the desert 
air.” While it is ours to live nobly day by day, 
God husbands the deed and garners the final results, 
thus estimating life, not in fragments, but as a whole. 

It is quite natural to desire to see the full meaning 
of life as it is lived. Shallow minds grow weary of 
the prolonged plot. Frenzied lovers want to “die 
the same day,” and the ideal hero, évOeos kat éxppwv,” 
would, along with Lord Nelson at Trafalgar, 
vanish in a blaze of glory. Yet, is life so wide and 
varied that beauty and solemnity as profound are 
to be found in quite another direction. “If we are 
moving among eternal emotions, there should be 
time to show that they are eternal.” Even love left 
desolate may feel, with a profound triumph, that it 
could never have rooted itself so deeply amid the 
joys of a visible return of affection as amid the many 
bereavements, and the lifelong memory of which is a 
constant joy. With “visions” none beside have 


5So inspired by one idea as to be emptied of all else. 


God’s World Plan as Revealed by Our Lord 103 


seen, heroic souls are kept steadfast in duty’s path; 
and it is a delight to recall such visions after they 
have faded from view, leaving only their memory in 
the soul whose fidelity “‘confirms the fiery finger 
which painted them there long ago.”’ 
As the Greek dramatists would end the first act of 
a trilogy with a hush of concentration and a declining 
note of calm, so to the Christian much of life amid 
the changing scenes of the many acts should suggest 
not so much the end as the continuation of the action, 
which is not measured by hurried time and not tested 
by the achievements here and now. So that the 
words of Robert Browning become pertinent when 
applied to the centuries: 
Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, 
The last of life, for which the first was made: 


Our times are in his hand Who saith, A whole I planned, 
Youth shows but half; trust God; see all, nor be afraid! 


How great life becomes when lived with this 
incentive! The hero is not always conscious of the 
greatness of his deeds. He acts as the bird sings, 
under the momentary impulse and because it seems 
right to do so, and the world husbands the results. 
Men rarely reap the results of their own toiling. One 
sows and another reaps. Great authors and in- 
ventors have lived in want and died in obscurity, 
while others have grown rich and luxuriated on the 
fruit of the forgotten genius and his toils. To make 
money and grow rich was the least of their thoughts. 
Louis Agassiz told his friend that he had not time to 
make money. The martyrs and prophets toiled and 
died for ideals; we to-day reap the benefits of their 
heroism. The Reformers gave themselves to the 


104 A Gospel for the New Age 


truth as they saw it; the world to-day enjoys the 
liberty of thought for which they died. Cromwell’s 
life was far from being a bed of roses, yet he gave to 
England many centuries of the best régime that the 
nation ever saw. How long does the influence of a 
statesman last? The light of Moses is still aglow 
after four thousand years, yet he died without set- 
ting foot on the land of ‘‘milk and honey” which he 
bequeathed to his Hebrew people. Such men in- 
augurate new epochs and leave it to others to enjoy 
the fruitage. Never was this truth told more 
beautifully than in the New Testament. Here the 
heroism of the old dispensation is recalled, the faith 
of the fathers and their sufferings are recited, the 
idealism and disappointments of the whole high 
ancient world are cited with this conclusion: “‘ These 
all, having obtained a good report through faith, 
received not the promise; God having provided 
[in the far-future days] some better thing for us, 
that they without us should not be made perfect.’’® 
They who sleep in Flanders’ Fields gave themselves 
in supreme sacrifice for a victory they themselves 
could not enjoy; but millions of others have been 
enriched beyond measure by their sufferings, and 
God will see that the day shall never come when the 
fruitage of that victory shall cease. A ruthless 
Gentile sent our Lord to the Cross while he was yet a 
youth, and it may have seemed that his life was cut 
short before reaching its flower, and all was lost; 
but, as Jean Paul Richter saw it, this same youth 
“lifted with his pierced hands empires off their 
hinges, turned the streams of centuries out of their 


6Hebrews xi. 39, 40. 


God’s World Plan as Revealed by Our Lord 105 


channels, and still governs the ages.’”’ Those who 
sometimes lose hope and grow weary may well con- 
sole themselves with this far-off harvest truth. God 
sometimes sends his sowers forth weeping, bearing 
precious seed; but his reapers shall return rejoicing, 
bringing their sheaves, singing the corn reapers’ 
songs of victory. God plans not for one day only, 
but for untold ages; and while his workers “‘rest 
from their labors,’’ their works fail not, and God 
alone knows what generation shall thrust in the 
whetted sickle and garner the golden grain. 


AN AMELIORISTIC WORLD 


While ours is not the pessimist’s ‘‘worst possible 
world making for ultimate ruin,” nor yet the Leib- 
nitzian”’ best possible world as it is to-day’’; it is, 
as Jesus saw it, a world full of beauty and worth, 
yet burdened with “‘tribulations’”—an amelioristic 
world, growing better age after age, a world of in- 
finite possibilities, and day by day unfolding the 
marvelous plans of God, that his will may be done in 
earth as it is in heaven. To be a part of such a 
world and to assist in the ultimate accomplishment 
of such plans is the crowning glory of mankind. 

Thus we have reached a very imperfect conception 
of human life as a wise Creator planned that we 
should live it. To the impatient, shallow-minded 
soul it may seem all confusion and a path to certain 
defeat; but to the trustful, patient one with faith to 
penetrate deeper than the eye can see such a life is 
the ‘‘royal road,” the way to true greatness and all 
that is at all worth while. As with the manly student 
who finds that difficult problems and athletic 


106 A Gospel for the New Age 


“scrims”’ call him to his very best, so with the true 
soul this life, with its many moral problems and 
difficult soul tasks, only springs him to his highest 
and best. Such a life to him is indeed inspiring, 
most fascinating and glorious. 

Our Saviour approached life from exactly this 
angle, and at no time in all his illustrious career do 
we find him at variance with God’s world plan as 
herein briefly set forth. Joyfully he entered into 
life with all its seemingly adverse conditions, pa- 
tiently he bore up under its burdens, and heroically 
he triumphed in the end. His whole experience was 
in demonstration of the wisdom and beauty of God’s 
thoughts concerning man and his victorious achieve- 
ments. It was life cast in just this mold that our 
Saviour came to assume, to redeem, and to glorify. 


CHAPTER V 


HUMANITY’S DARKEST SHADOW 


‘‘While men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among 
the wheat, and went his way.”—Matthew xiii. 25. 


CHAPTER V 
HUMANITY’S DARKEST SHADOW 


THE very fact of God’s offer of his gift of infinite 
love, with our religion as its avenue, would seem to 
imply that there is a great darkness to illumine, a 
great gap to fill, a vaster life to live than anything 
we may know by nature. And in our experience we 
have found it so. ‘‘Where sin did abound, grace 
did much more abound.” God is beautiful in the 
sunshine and the sparkle of the morning dew; he is 
more beautiful still in the glow of the stars by night. 
He is great and good, fathomless and adorable to 
the soul of the upright man; but never so lovable 
and great as when seen in his compassionate mercy 
for a sin-burdened world. There is no god compara- 
ble to him who heals the hurt and lifts up a bruised 
and fallen humanity. 

Man lives in a world where God is, but where sin 
is also. Men are far from a unit in their opinions as 
to the origin of life, how sin got into the world, and 
of man’s primeval state. But one thing is sure: 
_ evil is in the world, and the “‘Eden tragedy”’ is be- 
ing reénacted every day we live. Every child born 
into the world finds an Eden of innocence awaiting 
him, out from which he must go of himself if he ever 
drifts astray. Yes; the tempter is present on every 
hand. Every rose has its thorn, every joy its pos- 
sible sorrow. By every opening pathway evil stands 
with beckoning hand, saying: “This is the way of 
pleasure; walk here and find wealth.” 

(109) 


110 A Gospel for the New Age 


This is life’s most tragic chapter, full of mingled 
mystery and glory, yet the life we all must live. 
To some it is a poem full of beauty and charm, 
while to others it is deep tragedy. 


WHENCE CAME EVIL IN THE WORLD? 


If we would rightly understand what personal 
sin is, we must first consider what moral evil in 
general is. From this source sin follows as fruit 
from a vine. Sin is the individual result of the domi- 
nance of evil in the life of the man. Evil is natural; 
sin is personal and results from preference in con- 
duct. Evil may and often does exist independently 
of personal willing. We speak of evil thoughts, of 
evil impulses, of evil influences, and of social evils. 
Men are “tempted with evil.” Yet all this may 
occur without any sin in the individual. Men are 
not sinners till they yield to the influences of evil 
and become its victims. Sin, therefore, implies the 
functioning of personality and morality. Good and 
courageous men may and do resist the Siren songs 
of evil temptation and live a righteous life in the 
midst of a crooked and perverse generation. 

Why is there sin in the world, and how did moral 
evil begin to be? Man has long and anxiously 
asked this troublesome question, but has never been 
able to find a satisfactory answer. We cannot help 
asking such questions, since curiosity is the main- 
spring of mind. When we cease to question, we 
cease to think. Evil is in the world and besets us 
on every hand. It affects us more vitally than any 
other influence in life, and is the worst enemy we 
have. What wonder then that thinking men in all 


Humanity’s Darkest Shadow 111 


ages should try to learn something of its origin and 
its nature? To ask why evil should exist is a hopeful 
indication in man, because it recognizes evil as an 
abnormal fact in human life. To ask why good 
‘exists would indeed be a wail of despair. To con- 
tinue the struggle against evil after centuries of 
seeming failure is truly heroic, and voices the con- 
viction that evil is not a part of the universal order, 
and therefore not necessary nor sovereign, but 
subordinate and to be overcome. It is ever a false 
note and most difficult to harmonize. But since 
for ages men have failed in their attempt to solve 
the problem, shall they cease trying? Is there not 
such a thing as the progress of thought, and have 
not other age-long problems been successfully ex- 
plained? 
SOME PAGAN ATTEMPTS 

The ancient pagan attempts to solve the problem 
of the origin of evil only pushed the difficulty farther 
back into the darkness of the past. Grecian 
mythology taught that Ati, the eldest daughter of 
Zeus, was the evil genius who, .by blinding all, 
caused evil to appear in the world. Besides this 
there was the Zoroastrian idea of a dual divinity—in 
fact, two gods, good and bad, of equal power. The 
warfare of these conflicting powers has continued 
forever. Then, there was the Roman conception 
of a god for every separate impulse, whether good 
or bad. In the doings of their thirty thousand gods 
they found a source for all their ills and misfortunes. 
But all these and like attempts are but the shifts 
of helpless humanity to get rid of a difficulty by 
transferring it from the human to the divine realm, 


112 A Gospel for the New Age 


or laying the responsibility for evil upon the shoulders 
of others besides those of man. In keeping with this 
is a certain very pious theology which would heap 
all the evils of the present on the shoulders of our 
distant ancestors, or make sin a necessity in the 
development of goodness. 

Besides this, there has been the attempt to ignore 
the existence of evil. Poets have tried to sing away 
the hideous deformity, and good men have at times 
been led to close their eyes to the awful fact. So 
holy a man as Thomas Aquinas, wrote: “‘God 
created all things; but sin is nothing, so God is not 
the author of it.”” Pope says in his ‘“‘Essay on Man”: 

** All discord, harmony misunderstood, 
All partial evil, universal good.” 

Then even Robert Browning has this line in his 

“Abt Vogler”’: 


“The evil is naught, is null, is silence implying sound.” 


Besides this, there are certain present-day theories 
which are based upon pantheism pure and simple. 
They say that ‘“‘apparent evils are not basal entities 
or things. They are simply the absence of good.” 
And ‘‘God is in all, God is good, therefore there is 
no evil.” All this is but a camouflage and counter- 
feit of ancient follies long since outlived and too 
childish to require dignified consideration in a treatise 
on so serious a subject as the welfare of the immortal 
soul. 

The rock on which all these “nothing” theories 
are wrecked is practical experience. This has shown 
that evil as a moral quality is as real as good, and 
the temptation to evil is often the stronger of the 


Humanity’s Darkest Shadow 113 


two. The desire for evil pleasures is no less vital 
than that which seeks the pure. The will to do evil 
is just as strong and often stronger than the will 
which prefers the righteous action. The end sought 
is no more negative in the one case than in the 
other. ‘If evil be a ‘nothing,’” says Henry van 
Dyke, “‘it is a strange, active, positive, and potential 
nothing with all the qualities of a ‘something.’ 
This ‘nothing’ theory of evil raises a still more dif- 
ficult question: How did evil, which is a mere noth- 
ing, come to have the reality of life and the power 
of an awful something?” 

There are theories of evil based on necessity; 
but these are all disguised variations of Fatalism, 
which in reality only intensifies the problem in 
hand by abandoning the very foundation of moral 
distinctions. If one has no choice of action, but 
must live the life thrust upon him, be that good or 
bad, where can there be accountability, or any 
ethical quality whatever? All sense of good and 
evil would vanish from our thoughts under such 
conditions. Such a suggestion, even, would be an 
affront to intelligence in quest of light on life’s 
difficult problems. 

Is it not a little strange that these theories of evil, 
deflowered of any beauty they may once have had, 
should continue to live at all, much less receive 
serious attention in this our practical age? They 
find no support in the common experience of man- 
kind. Men everywhere admit that there are certain 
things which are allowable and certain other things 
which ought to be condemned. True, there are 
certain actions which involve questions of casuistry. 

8 


114 A Gospel for the New Age 


There are occasions when the quality of the deed 
must be determined by the motive which inspired it. 
The same deed which would be lawful and right for 
one person to commit might be entirely wrong for 
another. For example, an officer might confiscate 
property. This for him would be an act of patriotic 
duty; but for a private individual it would become 
an act of larceny. Here and everywhere the idea of 
right and wrong pertains instinctively, and no 
amount of sophistry can deprive sane humanity of 
this moral sense. Though done up in the garb of 
religion, the nature of the philosophy is not changed. 


EVOLUTION No HELP 


Evolution, in the construction of a theory of the 
human race, could not have failed to run into the 
vexed problem of evil in human life. This problem 
it could not evade. In its attempted solution of 
evil, the old and well-founded method of treating 
the subject is reversed. In place of innocent child- 
hood followed by degenerate manhood, the evolu- 
tionist paints the picture of childhood savagery, 
up from which we all have come. Up to a certain 
stage of development primal man is conceived as 
having no moral sense; but subsequent to that stage 
the soul emerges and moral and religious sensibilities 
are felt. Now, what we call sin to-day the evolu- 
tionist tells us is the lingering trace of animal 
savagery which men have not yet been able to cast 
off, as the tadpole sheds his tail. In the optimism 
of this philosophy they tell us that it is only a ques- 
tion of time—a million or two of years—till all sin 
will disappear from the life of man. They tell us in 


Humanity’s Darkest Shadow 115 


effect, not that men love darkness because their 
deeds are evil, but that their deeds are evil because 
they cannot help walking in darkness, for a few 
millenniums at least. And they say that the fatal 
blunder of mankind lies in man’s not having suf- 
ficiently evolved from the primeval state of apehood. 
The race calamity, therefore, is not the result of 
deliberate sinning, but in delayed progress, which we 
of to-day could not help. 

But from all this what light can we gather to il- 
lumine the problem of evil? There is ethical sane- 
ness in holding man responsible for forfeiting an 
innocence by an act of deliberate disobedience; but 
what can we conclude, how extricate ourselves from 
the confusion, if Eden were an African jungle and 
Adam an ape into whose cranium an ethical concept 
had never crept? Not being versed in the vocabulary 
of ‘“‘apeology,”’ we admit the truth of being nonplused. 

This theory of the origin of evil has two outstand- 
ing fallacies: (1) It makes God—if there be a God 
in the Universe of Apehood—to be the author of all 
primal sin, since the state in which man first found 
himself was fatalistically evil. If man should achieve 
goodness at all, it must be by climbing out of his 
first estate. Under such circumstances, the logical 
inquiry would not be, Whence came evil into the 
world, since that is normal? but, Whence came good, 
the abnormal and superhuman something? (2) The 
other fallacy is seen in the fact that this theory 
destroys the very foundation of all ethical concep- 
tions, in that it makes the sinner to be the helpless 
victim of a natural order not of his making and leaves 
him the sport of forces over which he has no control. 


116 A Gospel for the New Age 


Such a theory clashes with all man’s moral instincts 
and outrages his sense of justice. It is at least rea- 
sonable to condemn a mature man, at whatever 
stage of human history, for forfeiting an exalted 
estate of innocence which he knew, in which a kind 
Creator had placed him; but what reason or justice 
is there in condemning a helpless infant for not leap- 
ing out of his childhood crib into a manhood of 
which he knows nothing whatever and of which he 
has but an instinctive hint at most? Yet some men 
would tellus that this failure was the “fatal blunder of 
the race” and the source of all our human calamities. 

It is but fidelity to the truth to say that for the 
half century that the “‘nebular hypothesis” has held 
sway in the scientific world it has not thrown a 
single ray of light on the origin of evil and its remedy. 
Evolution has pointed out the “origin of species 
by natural selection,” and spoken splendidly upon 
the upward trend of mankind; but upon moral 
questions, such as the origin of evil and sin, it has 
only “‘darkened counsel by words without wisdom.” 
Its advocates have left the old paths and struck out 
toward the jungle with all their tangled mazes of 
guesses in an imaginary world. Yet these guesses 
are what they offer a sad world as ‘‘science,” from 
which, if real, there can be no appeal. Nor has the 
world’s thought been enriched by their departure, 
though we would not claim for the old school the 
final word on such dark problems. 


WHAT THE OLD MASTERS TAUGHT 


The old masters, having back of them the facts 
accumulated from experience, together with the best 


Humanity’s Darkest Shadow 117 


that could be wrought in psychology and vital 
theology, lead us at last in the direction of light, 
and not as blind leaders of the blind. One cannot 
but feel safe under their leadership, since they test 
every step they take. 

In their attempt to account for the origin of evil 
and sin in the world they pointed to the natural fact 
that all qualities have their counterparts—light has 
darkness, cold has heat, hope has despair, right has 
wrong. In the normal process of thought the ex- 
istence of one implies the existence of its negative. 
If light be the absence of darkness, darkness is the 
absence of light. The human mind cannot conceive 
of the creation of light without the possibility of the 
absence of light being darkness, or the creation of 
good without the possibility of its opposite, bad or 
evil. In a moral world like ours, where all depends 
upon the functioning of personality, where character 
and holiness depend upon the exercise and determina- 
tion of the sovereign will, there must be an alterna- 
tive of choice. Of course we all believe that God 
preferred that the world he had created should re- 
main “good,” that man should choose the good and 
live a righteous life; just as he preferred that we 
avoid the violation of all nature’s laws and escape 
the suffering that violation brings. But in making 
the good choice possible, the bad choice must also 
be possible, as the alternative to a free individual 
soul. All depends upon the liberty of choice in the 
sovereign will. Liberty of will, then, which implied 
the power of a contrary choice, was the doorway 
by which evil crept into the world. This liberty, so 
disastrous in its abuse, is held by man as the most 


118 A Gospel for the New Age 


precious right in human possession, and when rightly 
exercised becomes the crowning gift of God to man. 
There is no class of men, high or low, learned or 
illiterate, rich or poor, where the love of liberty is 
not found and where slavery is not a most chafing 
bondage. So that, with all the dangers possible, 
mankind prefers the thrill and daring of choosing 
for himself. For this, and only this, he is responsible 
to his Maker. 


Tue HEREDITY OF EVIL 


Out of the exercise of the liberty of choice and its 
abuse has come the still darker mystery—namely, 
the heredity of evil, resulting in a distinct trait of 
character. No fact of science is better established 
than the heredity of natural characteristics. It is 
commonly expected that offspring should partake 
of the traits of parentage. The establishing of 
character in one generation by a voluntarily fixed 
habit in a parent of the former generation has long 
been recognized as a fact in nature. “Like begets its 
like,” and by persistent cultivation an instinct be- 
comes intensified in course of time. The effect of 
environment, added to the natural ability, produces 
the greater characteristic; and the habit which be- 
came “‘second nature” in one generation becomes 
“real nature” in the next and is permanently fixed 
in the child, thus originating a new species, giving 
us, where good is predominant, some of the noblest 
characters in life, but also, where evil is uppermost, 
the worst possible characters. Were the good not 
an inheritance along with the evil, life would be 
a dismal calamity into which it were better never to 


Humanity’s Darkest Shadow 119 


have been born. But the good along with the evil 
is present with equal chance in either choice. 

In spite of all our race progress, no darker picture 
presents itself to-day than the inheritance of evil 
with its intensified results. In all its blighting power 
evil has come tracing down the centuries and spread- 
ing laterally through all the strata of society. All 
about are innocent sufferers from bodily deformities 
and repulsive diseases which are inherited mis- 
fortunes left as a legacy by a former generation. 
Even in the normal individual the animal instinct 
often predominates over the spiritual motive and 
restraints, entailing lifelong struggles not of our 
making or choosing. Here is to be found the source 
of many evil agencies which work human defeat— 
such traits as mental stupidity, lack of initiative 
and courage, preference for the groveling, tendencies 
toward insanity, rascality, and the like—all of which 
are recognized as legacies from a former generation. 
Toward the victims of such traits the ethics of to-day 
have come to be commendably lenient, since they 
suffer from the sins of others, which lead to their 
own sinning. 


THE CONTAGION OF SOCIAL CONTACT 


But, while individual traits have come running 
down the ages through the channels of biological 
coherency, this is not the only channel through 
which sin is inherited. A more deadly agency still 
is found in the contagion of social contact. Over 
the innocent, too often, society spreads its dismal 
pall of ostracism confining them to an atmosphere 
of social degeneracy, where sins of the worst sort are 


120 A Gospel for the New Age 


generated and where conditions arise worse than 
death itself. Here sporadic tendencies to sin arise 
and evils emerge whose seeds were not in the blood 
of ancestry. By social contact evil has gone on 
reproducing itself in forms that amaze honest and 
pure parents. Thus sins of boyhood—lying, decep- 
tion, unchaste conversation, and cruelty—are trans- 
mitted from the older to the younger members of 
the gang. By the same method the sins of adults 
are generated—selfishness, greed, social spiteful- 
ness, extravagance, “‘graft,”’ pride of dress, the mad 
rush for luxury and pleasure seeking. All of such 
sins are propagated in the social atmosphere and are 
transmitted from individual to individual and from 
generation to generation by the contagion of social 
contact. 

The permanent vices and crimes are by no means 
all inherited from parentage. They have been 
received more from the contagion of society than 
from blood. Foundlings, when carefully reared in a 
pure atmosphere, often make the chastest of citizens; 
while children of the long lines of purest blood, 
sadly too often, are caught in the turbid social cur- 
rent and go down in disgrace. Not more certainly 
are disease germs planted in the blood of an unborn 
infant than are the sins of society forced upon the 
life of the younger and helpless generation. As 
people drift to the city and society becomes more 
compact and complex, so the contagion of evil will 
increasingly multiply and become the more defiant 
of control. 

In the light of the solidarity of society as we see it 
to-day can we understand why it was that the old 


Humanity’s Darkest Shadow 121 


prophets treated the sins of Israel more as the sins 
of an individual than as the sins of anation? Yet 
those sins were national rather than individual. 
While individual responsibility cannot be entirely 
- eliminated from human life, there are times and con- 
ditions when this must be largely suspended. The 
individual becomes submerged in the social whole. 
Some rulers and men of ‘‘big business” often desire 
this state of things. Their subjects or laborers are 
viewed as mere human machines, like pawns upon a 
chessboard, to be shoved around at will. This is 
true of all armies, which are merely vast fighting 
engines. This fact is defiantly prominent in the 
industrial and commercial world, and is becoming 
so in the social world, in which we all must take 
our place. Here conditions are thrust upon the 
individual of which he does not approve, and deeds 
are committed which are not of his making. Yet, 
being a factor in organized society, he is reminded 
that ‘‘since he runs with the pack he must howl like 
the wolf.” Being in Rome, he must do as Rome 
does. This racial relation is as old as civilization. 
“Man,” says Philo, ‘‘is a social animal by nature. 
Therefore he must live not only for himself, but for 
his own family, for relatives and friends, for his 
tribe, for his country, his race, and all mankind.” 
Thus, being compelled by nature to live for the parts 
of the whole, and also for the entire world, he is 
responsible for and must suffer with the whole of his 
tribe or nation, and, in a measure, with the whole 
world. His fortune and fate are bound up with his 
party, union, or Church. In their prosperity he 
finds his own glory, and in their ignominy he feels 


122 A Gospel for the New Age 


the sting of shame. It is a law of universal social 
organization that he should feel this particeps 
criminis. We are parts of a social whole and have 
our share of the burden whether we will or not. 

Thus, since individuals are interlocked in the social 
whole, we can see the wisdom of regarding society 
as an individual which must be held responsible for 
conditions which no one person can control. ‘“‘So- 
ciety,”’ says Hugo, “stands in the pillory with every 
criminal who is there.” 


THE RACE BLIGHT 


This natural evil is the “‘blight”’ of the race, the 
infected atmosphere where sin thrives most luxuriant- 
ly. This is that state called by St. Paul ‘‘the carnal 
mind, at enmity against God: for it is not subject to 
the law of God, neither indeed can be.” It is the 
cause of that deep antipathy in unregenerated minds 
which makes sin seem so plausible and right living 
so difficult. This evil cannot always be classed as 
‘sin’ in the active sense. We inherit it whether 
we will or not, and we cannot be held responsible 
for that which we did not occasion. There is a 
tendency in certain cults of late to ignore this fact 
and treat evil as if it were not. But evil is one of the 
most stubborn of facts in human nature, and this 
evil bent is all the worse for being within the camp. 
Our duty lies in bringing this ‘‘nature” under and 
in keeping it in subjection. The possession of an 
evil inclination is not the fatal fact, but yielding to 
it is. By fighting against all such misfortunes and 
natural evils and overcoming them, man becomes 
a hero, a saint of the finest type. But yielding to 


Humanity’s Darkest Shadow 123 


evil is man’s fatal blunder, since thereby he becomes 
a sinner and has enlisted in a cause which may bring 
him untold trouble. This warfare against evil and 
the triumph over it constitute the very lifework of a 
- Christian; and our Saviour, having won the victory 

here, could say with triumphant acclaim: “ Be of good 
cheer; I have overcome the world.” : 


Gop’s HIGHEST FAVOR 


In the creation of man as a moral and sovereign 
soul and placing him in a probationary state with 
strength sufficient to triumph over evil the Heavenly 
Father has bestowed upon man his freest, highest 
creative favor. Man’s sovereign right to dispose of 
his own destiny constitutes the noblest part of his 
likeness to God, in whose image he was created. 
In this God has shown his own confidence in the 
being he has created, and has given him the op- 
portunity to achieve the noblest destiny possible. In 
all this God is benignly fair. In the matter of heredi- 
ty the good traits have ever the same opportunity 
of being transmitted as the bad, if they have not 
indeed a better chance. In the Decalogue, where 
the law of heredity is invoked, the wording is, 
“visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the chil- 
dren unto the third and fourth generation of them 
that hate me; and showing mercy unto thousands 
[of generations] of them that love me, and keep my 
commandments.” In our shortsightedness we have 
considered only the heredity of the evil and forgotten 
the good. We have remembered the pain and see 
not the love back of it all. We see the piteous suffer- 
ing of helpless women and children, and want to call 


124 A Gospel for the New Age 


the law of nature which imposed the burden a cruel 
one, without seeing the end in view. In the ministry 
of suffering God is doing all in his power to keep us 
in the right path; and in making our wrongdoing 
to recoil upon those we love, he is appealing to the 
strongest force in our natures. In the mere matter 
of the fear of punishment there is only selfishness, 
and no religious merit; but in the consideration of 
others there is highest virtue. Here we find the 
patriotism of statesmen and parenthood, here the 
wonderful love of God. Now, man’s noblest trait 
and strongest love are found manifesting themselves 
for those most dear to him. Who has not known 
parents, mothers, to die for their children? They 
would often much rather be dead than have disgrace 
to fall on their beloved families. This thought is 
back of much suicide. 

Now, if love of wife and children be the noblest 
passion of man, was it not the wisdom of love for 
God to appeal to this in the development and pro- 
tection of human character? Show man that “an 
act of sin destroys more Edens than his own”’ and, 
if there is a spark of manhood in him, he will do his 
best to keep himself from sinning. This is God’s 
way of thinking about man’s relation to life and the 
path to greatness, hence a law of life. 

The matter of choice between right and wrong 
comes to all sane souls alike. The same energy 
which, when expended in evil doing, carries man 
down with frightful speed, would, if applied to 
good, accomplish its marvelous wonders, resulting 
in a life of honor, love, and high confidence among 
men, Thus it comes to be seen that what at first 


Humanity’s Darkest Shadow 125 


seemed to be only a race hardship and handicap 
is, in fact, the greatest of opportunities; and what 
some have deemed a personal calamity comes to be 
recognized as the greatest of God’s blessings. 

Then may we not rightly conclude that it was 
best that man should have been created a free, 
moral being, sovereign in soul and entrusted with 
the custody of his own destiny? Thus it pleased 
an all-wise Creator to make him; and upon this basis 
we know all human life is constructed and all moral 
accountability rests. Without the sovereignty of 
choice man would be something entirely different 
from what he is; but what that “‘something”’ would 
be we have no means of knowing, unless it were a 
race of incompetents wholly without liberty, hence 
incapable of any moral character of religion what- 
ever. 

All the facts go to show that evil in the world 
to-day as we see it, together with the more powerful 
good, harks back to a far-distant ancestral choice 
which, persisted in, became a “‘life,’’ transmissible 
from parent to child. Thus the race peculiarity 
was acquired; and, but for the law of heredity and 
the wisdom to control it and determine its results, 
each generation would have come into the world 
on the level of ancestral savagery. Each soul should 
have had to climb the hill himself, race progress 
would have been an impossibility, the greatness of 
our day unattainable, and the future a dreary 
wilderness full of roving nomads. 

God in his infinite wisdom has created us moral 
beings and governs us by the law of love, assigning 
suffering as a penalty for wrongdoing, but joy and 


126 A Gospel for the New Age 


gladness as a reward for right doing. He nowhere 
governs us by coercion, not even by the overpower- 
ing influence of love. That man does go astray in 
spite of all inducement to right living does not de- 
tract from his native grandeur. As St. Augustine 
so forcefully put it: ‘‘The horse which will sometimes 
go astray is more noble than a stone (statue) which 
has no power of action.”’ In like manner let us re- 
member that the human race, with its powers of 
personality and privilege of loving and serving God, 
even though this implies the possibility of going 
astray, is more glorious as a race than it could pos- 
sibly be without these capacities. The all-wise God 
seems to have thought so from all eternity; then may 
we not lovingly learn so to think with him concern- 
ing the life he has allotted us to live, and by the right 
use of the powers and privileges he has given us 
come to the highest possible attainment in life in 
time and in eternity? Into just such a world our 
Saviour came to invest his own great life, thereby 
redeeming us from this “present evil world” and 
showing by his own spotless life that evil is not su- 
preme, but can be mastered and overcome by human 
personality aided by divine grace. 


CHAPTER VI 


SIN: THE MORAL BLIGHT OF THE INDIVIDUAL 


‘“‘Now art thou cursed from the earth. . . . A fugitive 
and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth. And Cain said 
unto the Lord, My punishment is greater that I can bear.” 
—Genesis iv. 11-18. 

‘In the long run the test of any religion will be its power 
to arouse repentance and religious consecration. It is one 
thing for a theology to nurture a life already Christian; it is 
quite another to beget the Christian life. A church must be 
something more than a theological orphanage. It must bear 
its own spiritual children. It is a sense of the reality of sin 
that alone can make the gospel anything more than a graduate 
lecture course in Christian ethics. A religious message that 
cannot stir sinners to repentance is not the gospel of the New 
Testament.’”—Shailer Mathews. 

To want to be saved, men must want to be saved from 
something—from personal disgrace and eternal damnation. 
And this is sin. 


CHAPTER VI 


SIN: THE MORAL BLIGHT OF THE 
INDIVIDUAL 


SIN is a fact of such proportions that it cannot be 
ignored. It is writ large on the face of humanity. 
As an element of discord in the universal moral 
order, it is a terrible reality. A sense of its blighting 
power has ever been back of humanity’s sorrows 
and age-long sigh for relief. To attempt a denial 
of its baneful results would be to falsify the universal 
experience of mankind. Nor need we wait for a full 
knowledge of its nature before seeking to avoid its 
consequences. It is enough to know that it is here 
and that it ruins. Sin is humanity’s most dangerous 
foe. It besets man not only in the earlier ages of 
his development, or in an insanitary social circle, 
but at all stages and in all conditions of life. It 
intrudes itself into the life of the learned and rich 
as well as into the life of the poor and humble, and 
with the same blighting breath would blast the fair- 
est flower in a king’s palace as ruthlessly as it would 
ruin the child of the cottager. No amount of artful 
camouflage can hide its ugliness nor costly silks 
and diamonds take away its deadly sting. Gold 
cannot bribe it into innocence. We may willfully 
close our eyes to its presence, but to ignore it is not 
to escape its clutches or stay its consequences. 
The attempt would be to try to reverse the order of 
nature and show lack of moral honesty. 

9 (129) 


130 A Gospel for the New Age 


Sin is not to be defined as easily as it is to be felt. 
Each attempt at a definition would vary according 
to the experience of him who makes the attempt, 
and all attempts would fall short of reality. Every 
genuine feeling of sin throws light upon the reality 
and helps one to comprehend that which may not 
be told. We may not be able to explain how it is 
that man may feel free enough to be fully responsi- 
ble for his thoughts, feelings, and actions, and yet 
conscious at the same time that he is joined to a 
common ground in human nature. Stranger still is 
the fact that this propensity is felt to be not an ex- 
cuse but an aggravation. “Anger is felt to be nota 
palliation for an ugly deed, but grounds for further 
condemnation.”’ 

Looked at from the viewpoint of the individual, 
sin has been defined as ‘‘missing the mark” (dpap- 
tavw), that perversion in man’s nature which causes 
him to fail of accomplishing his true destiny. From 
a legal point of view, ‘‘sin is the transgression of the 
law’’—a going beyond the prescribed limit. Both 
of these concepts are wrapped up in the fact of sin. 

The consciousness of sin is a religious fact. In 
our secular conversations we speak of crime, false- 
hood, dishonesty; but when expressing our religious 
feelings we find no word to suit so well as the word 
*“‘sin.”” Deeply fixed in man is his moral conscious- 
ness, his sense of ‘‘oughtness’”—that some things 
should be allowed, while others should not be. No 
man can remember when he first felt this moral 
sense, and no history dates its genesis as a race at- 
tainment. It is the very foundation of religion, a 
gift from God in the nature of man. Disobedience 


Sin: The Moral Blight of the Individual 181 


to this ‘still small voice” constitutes man a sinner. 
To disregard this and run counter to its edicts, is 
to become disloyal to the moral order to which man 
belongs. And since the ‘natural order” is God’s 
law, to disregard this is to disobey God, to put one’s 
self out of right relations with God, and out of har- 
mony with the laws of his own being. It is this 
discordant fact that is back of humanity’s deep 
~ sense of need and that smiting of conscience in the 
soul of the sinner. 

Sin is not to be considered as an infectious dis- 
ease, a something acquired from the outside world 
to germinate and spread throughout the entire man 
—not that, but a personal matter, a derangement of 
the soul which throws it out of harmony, like the 
discord of an ill-tuned instrument. This state 
persisted in begets a false standard of life whereby 
the highest, noblest sense is lost to the soul. The 
key to the correct harmony of life becomes a “lost 
art” in the soul of the sinner. He may mar his soul, 
but he can never mend it. A good man is never 
self-made. 

SIN AS JESUS SAw IT 


As Jesus saw it sin was a very real something. 
Any effort that we might make to define sin as he 
saw it would fall far below what we instinctively 
feel was his real estimate of it. One might as well 
attempt to define life or death. To him sin was not 
a mere negation, but a positive reality. While he 
showed marvelous pity for the victims of sin, he 
was a deadly enemy to the existing fact. Nor did 
he narrow it down to an illegality, and, after the 
customs of the day, seek to escape it by conforming 


132 A Gospel for the New Age 


to certain ecclesiastical laws. He himself often broke 
the laws of the Pharisees, and both by precept and 
by practice dared to shatter the statutory righteous- 
ness of his times. He laid down the broad principle 
that it is the life that counts, and this life back of 
the act determines the quality of the deed. No man 
is saved because of the multitude of his good deeds, 
but his deeds are good because they are prompted 
by righteous motives. On a memorable occasion 
Christ found those who were so deeply degenerate 
as to have lost the sense of ethical distinctions, so 
that good was supposed to have been generated 
by the prince of devils. Those men he considered 
entirely hopeless, since they mistook the acts of God 
for the works of Satan. 

As estimated by Christ, sin is antisocial. In 
emphasizing features of sin he made prominent the 
fact that a life not controlled by love is a wrong and 
sinful life, since love in its thoughtfulness of others 
is highly social. With him sin is not simply un- 
righteousness; it is a disintegrating force which 
hurts society. Men who “trusted in themselves 
that they were righteous and despised others” 
were sinful men. The rejected and outcasts of the 
kingdom were those who, in the midst of abundance, 
cared not for the poor and needy; while the ‘‘ blessed 
of the Father” were those who fed the hungry, 
clothed the naked, and visited the sick and impris- 
oned. To call God “father” was to call every other 
man “brother.”’ To be a sinner then, as Christ 
saw sin, was not only to be out of right relation with 
a God of love, but also out of right relation with all 
mankind. Sin is, then, not simply the violation of 


Sin: The Moral Blight of the Individual 188 


a certain code of laws or organized government; 
it is essentially a matter of adjustment between two 
personalties—between man and man, and between 
man and his Maker. It is first of all being right or 
wrong with God that makes one right or wrong with 
his fellow man. It would be folly to speak of a 
man being right with God and at the same time 
wrong with his neighbor. “If thou bring thy gift to 
the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother 
hath aught against thee; leave there thy gift before 
the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy 
brother, and then come and offer thy gift.” 

Sin is not only antisocial; it is essentially selfish- 
ness, out of which the antisocial feature flows as a 
stream from a fountain. In all its ways it is self- 
centered and egoistic. In the soul of every one 
there is a throne, and some power must reign supreme 
in the personal realm. There rulership rightly 
belongs to God. That throne was erected for the 
divine dominion; but the sinner has rebelled against 
God, has dethroned him in the heart, and set up 
self in God’s stead. His own desires, whims, ambi- 
tions—and not God’s will—are the laws of his life. 
Men who have deified self have no higher law than 
their own desires; being out of right relation with 
God and in open disregard of his will, they come to 
indulge freely in sin, and are often dead to moral 
obligations—in fact to all kinds of obligations except 
such as seem to further their personal designs. 
Such persons become entirely unsocial. Such men 
have slight regard for the rights of others, and press 
their covetous will to the injury of society. “They 
are willing to frustrate the cause of liberty and social 


134 A Gospel for the New Age 


justice in whole nations in order to hold their selfish, 
social, and economic privileges. Men who have 
been powerful enough to do so have left broad trails 
of destruction and enslavement through history in 
order to satisfy their selfish caprice, avarice, and 
thirst for glory.’”! 

In its highest form, sin assumes the aspect of a 
conflict between the selfish ego and the common good 
of humanity—between the self and God. This 
renders the sinner unlike God. Certain godless 
traits sin everywhere produces, such as selfishness, 
sensuality, pride, hatred, the desire to succeed at 
the expense of others. Such sins are contrary to 
the law of love, and tend to enslave the soul and 
deflower it of its likeness to God. This in the teach- 
ings of the Scripture is exactly the condition of the 
“unsaved”? man. To be dominated by such a spirit 
is to give oneself over to that downward pull which 
makes right living so difficult, unrighteousness so 
plausible, and the future so dark. Dr. Shailer 
Mathews sums it all up in these words: ‘‘The soul 
whose likeness to God lies in the fact that he can 
love and serve and hope and sacrifice, has prostrated 
himself to the lowest nature which hates and lusts 
and lies and fights like a beast.” 

By such relations personality is injured and, 
apart from the redemptive agency, the soul degen- 
erates utterly, reaching that which to the mind of 
St. Paul was the summary of all terrors—namely, 
“abiding under the wrath of God.” Sin clearly 
enough reaches its climax in the struggle of the sen- 
suous nature of man to assume the ascendancy over 





1Rauschenbusch. 


Sin: The Moral Blight of the Individual 185 


the spiritual personality, which should be loving, as 
God is love. This we know is essentially altruistic, 
while sin is’self-willed and militant toward all self- 
denial. 

SIN BLIGHTS THE SOUL 


Sin is most deadly to the sinner himself. ‘While 
it is a fact that when God comes to reckon up the 
final consequences of sin “all humanity is in the 
council chamber,” yet the first result of sin is real- 
ized by the sinner himself. While sinful acts reach 
out and ruin others, they first blight the soul from 
which they start. There are sins which hurt only 
the sinner, such as pride, profanity, hatred, in- 
fidelity, and envy; yet these are sins against God 
and eventually hurt the soul and bring suffering to 
the sinner. 

Men sometimes want to persuade themselves that 
the Heavenly Father is too merciful to allow the 
full penalty of sin to come upon the sinner. But 
they forget that “‘a God all mercy is a God unkind”’; 
that a merciful God must also be a God of justice; 
that a God of love must be a God of infinite right- 
eousness and law. ‘“‘In God the law is alive,” says 
Dr. Dale. The very element of tender compassion 
in the nature of God demands the far-seeing ad- 
ministration of right in the moral order of the uni- 
verse, which implies the punishment of the guilty 
as a preventive of wrong and the protection of right. 
Think as they may, men cannot escape the fact 
that “a terrible God is the God of love.” The 
jealous Jehovah of the Hebrews is our same loving 
Heavenly Father whose heart is wonderfully warm 
toward his earthly children. This is he who is 


136 A Gospel for the New Age 


immanent in nature everywhere. In spite of the 
rich treasure of parental love in his father’s house, 
“‘with bread enough and to spare,” the prodigal 
went steadily down to want, wretchedness, and 
pigsty disgrace. Even the infinite love of God 
cannot prevent such a fate if men willfully prefer 
such a state of degradation. 

Men may deceive themselves into thinking that 
God will ‘‘ wink” at wrongdoing and allow dishonesty 
to become the highway to success. They may find 
fair sailing for a season, but storms await in all such 
voyages. It has always been so, and God is not dead 
in these days of high criminality. His ways have 
been the same in all ages. Witness the downfall of 
the nations of history, the crowded felon’s cells, the 
wrecked home circles and broken hearts of the day— 
not to mention the woes of a war-crushed world. 
There stood the mailed form of the late Kaiser across 
the seas, with his mighty war lords, his far-famed 
chemists, his “big Berthas,” all ready to do his 
bidding in following the ancient Prussian tradition 
that “might makes right” and the substitution of 
the will of the Empire for justice and truth; while 
beneath his feet lay the sacred treaties with the na- 
tions, and poor, bleeding, raped, and ruined Belgium, 
whom the Empire had sworn to protect. But 
where now is that mighty ‘‘Imperial Government 
of Germany’? Gone like a burnt-out meteor from 
the sky, leaving the people who did his bidding 
writhing beneath the bitter burden of defeat and 
ruin, while the nation’s memory is a hideous night- 
mare and her name a reproach among men! He 
forsook the old paths and defied God and his laws; 


Sin: The Moral Blight of the Individual 187 


while his college professors who had drunk so deep- 
ly of the fountain of learning, instead of being true 
to the oracles of truth, cringed in the presence of 
power; and when the world looked to them for light 
and guidance, they became not true leaders and 
friends, but traitors and foes. To-day they are 
reaping their reward. Men may think God forgets; 
but when does he? Does he not hold even ‘‘imperial 
governments” to an account for wrongdoing? 


THE SINNER SELF-CONDEMNED 


No man knows the results of sin better than the 
sinner himself. He is not the “unlucky man” who 
happens to get caught in an ugly deed; but he himself 
is the “fact”’ in the sinning, and no amount of so- 
called good deeds can take away from the sinner 
the consciousness of sin. “A guilty conscience is 
its own accuser.”” The individual, and not simply 
his conduct, is “enmity against God,” and this fact 
gives color to the life known as sinful. The sinner 
cannot forget that he is a sinner and go on the rest 
of his days living a holy life. It is the fact of char- 
acter held in the indestructible grasp of memory 
that makes all the difference between the true, 
righteous man and the unholy one. The one fully 
aware of his oft-infirmities, his human weakness, 
and many failures knows that at heart he is loyal 
to God, and his highest aim is to do his Father’s 
will; while the other, with all his pious pretenses, 
knows that he is at heart a sinner in the sight of God 
and a rebel in his kingdom. This lingering conscious- 
ness stands out as an appalling obstacle between 


138 A Gospel for the New Age 


the man now and his future well-being, both for 
time and eternity. 


THE FACT OF MEMORY 


If memory were a mere matter of will power, 
so that one might will to remember or forget at 
pleasure, then sinning might make but little dif- 
ference in the economy of life. We might then all 
go free from sin’s consequences by simply “laying 
down our memory” at sunset and taking up life 
anew on the morrow. At death we might leave our 
sins forgotten in the grave and live a beautiful life 
of bliss beyond, spotless as a babe born in the Para- 
dise above. But what is memory? Is it a mere act 
of the will, or is it not rather an involuntary organic 
function of consciousness—a part of the state of 
life both of body and soul? The poet Dante, in his 
“Divine Comedy,” tells of a great fountain in 
Purgatory which flows in two streams. One he 
calls ‘“‘Lethe’”’ and the other he ealls ‘‘ Eunice,” 
whose waters had the double power to take away 
from those who drank thereof the memory of all 
evil deeds and to bring back the memory of all good 
ones. Were this a fact rather than a poet’s dream, 
what a wonderful stream it would be, and what 
would we not give for a quaff of its waves? Many 
aman would turn away from his evil ways and “‘fol- 
low virtue like a star” if only he could hush the 
voice of an accusing memory and go free from its 
influence forever. But the memory of the past 
haunts him like the baying of a bloodhound upon his 
track. The past rises up and assails him by all the 
agencies which mortgage us to the future. Since 


Sin: The Moral Blight of the Individual 189 


memory is a part of us—life of our life, part and sub- 
stance of our growth—what way of escape have we 
from life’s tragic history? Shall the shadows of 
time lie across our pathway forever? 

In one of his sermons, the late Newman Smyth 
says: “‘The mind of man is but a chamber of mem- 
ories, a hall of echoes, a gallery of endless whispers. 
In its archives are annals of the past. Mind is but 
a labyrinth of memories. Recollection is but a torch 
in the traveler’s hands to guide him through the 
mazes of the past, leading him from chamber to 
chamber in the wonderful palace of memory. In 
her vaults are the many receptacles for the records 
of the deeds done in the body. Though many of 
them seem to have been lost and the names written 
over names, yet the record of the years remains 
imprinted deeply in the very structure of the soul.’’ 
As a physical and mental fact, memory acts in- 
dependently of our wills to a large degree. Though 
at a particular time we may not be able to recall 
an event, yet that fact is not really forgotten, and 
at some unsuspected moment the whole scene comes 
back clearly enough. 


NATURE HAs ITs MEMORIES 


Sears from wounds remain after the hurt and 
harm have been long healed. The habits of ancestry 
come down from the past like birds from a distant 
clime to sing their sweet songs of the long ago, or 
like owls to hoot their condemnation of evil deeds 
of which we have no knowledge, yet fasten their 
thralldom upon us for generations. What is more 
remarkable than the outcropping of a remarkable 


140 A Gospel for the New Age 


mental ability found in a child of mediocre parent- 
age? The explanation is often found by a research 
in the archives of the past. The prodigy is but the 
‘“‘memory” of some gigantic mind long forgotten, 
but renewing again its life. Though but a “current 
of events,’ our plastic flesh has a memory all its 
own, which retains the features, gestures, motions, 
and images of loved ones long since gone. Nay, 
it reproduces the ages before our parents were born, 
and preserves the life processes of the race since the 
beginning. Perhaps instinct and ‘“‘subconscious 
mind” are but fixed traits or waves of bodily mem- 
ory which are constantly lashing the shores of the 
present. 

Memory asserts itself through all the organs of 
the body. The eye, the ear, the finger tips on the 
harp strings, the nerves silently at work beneath 
our active consciousness, all have their memories, 
while the brain is one vast sensorium of memories— 
that power without which the soul could scarcely 
maintain the consciousness of consecutive existence 
or even intelligence be a possibility. 


GOD’S REGISTRY OF EVENTS 


Now, since memory is a recognized bodily fact, 
an indestructible part of us, the sentinel and keeper 
of the accuracy of human intelligence, may we not 
-take one additional step forward and say that it is 
God’s registry of the deeds done in the body, an 
imprint written not only upon the body but upon 
the soul as well? When the soul passes from this 
present life, it will go not the same as when it came 
fresh from the hand of him who made it; but it will 


Sin: The Moral Blight of the Individual 141 


go as that original soul plus the impressions re- 
ceived in this life, increased or diminished by the 
good or bad it has occasioned. It is not difficult to 
see how every line of the present life may be etched 
upon the soul as it goes out into eternity, and the 
future life be the embodiment of the memories of 
the life on earth. In that life beyond one cannot 
-escape the impressions of this present life. They may 
become our eternal reveries to all eternity. Did 
not our Saviour show us this in the parable of the 
“rich man and Lazarus’ when Abraham is made to 
say, “Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime re- 
ceivedst thy good things’? This echo of time was 
the “‘rich man’s”’ food for reflection to all eternity. 
From that echo from the past there was no escape. 
No “Lethe” flowed in the abyss for him. Memory 
is eternal. This fact is essential to celestial sanity 
of the soul. It cannot by self-determination cease 
to exist. 

Nor is this yet all. If memory be God’s registry 
in the soul of the deeds done in the body, can it be 
possible for God to decree that a fact of the history 
of the universe, once inscribed on the annals of time, 
shall no longer continue to be, but become as though 
it had never been? If the finite mind cannot forget 
the great character-making events of life, can the 
infinite Intelligence do it? If man’s memory of the 
past shall become a fragment of the history of the 
universe, may we not carry the thought just one 
degree farther till we reach the memory of the Eternal 
One, and ask, Can God himself forget? Can he decree 
that sin, or any other great fact of life, shall be to 
him as though it had never been? Here is the crux 


142 A Gospel for the New Age 


of the entire problem of the forgiveness of sin; and 
till we shall find light upon this problem we shall 
grope in awful darkness. 

Compared with this, all other religious subjects 
pale into insignificance. If there be no such thing 
as the forgiveness of sins, and if it be not possible 
for God to “blot out our transgressions and re- 
member them against us no more’’—then, since 
evil is in the world and man has fallen victim to 
its power and become a sinner, it were a sad mis- 
fortune ever to have been born. But God is good; 
he is omniscient; and it was he who made us, and 
not we ourselves. Then let us take refuge in the 
belief that it was infinitely best that God should have 
created us and that we should know for ourselves 
that God can and does forgive sins. 

It may not be comely in a finite creature to ask 
or discuss what an infinite Being can or cannot do. 
The forgiveness of sins is not simply a question of 
divine ability, as though God were willing, but had 
not the power to forgive sins. But with us it becomes 
a question of the discovery of what God, the in- 
finitely perfect and merciful Father, from all eternity 
has been doing and will ever continue to do. For 
is it not by his deeds that we discover his character? 


CHAPTER VII 


THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN: GOD’S OPPORTUNITY 
WITH MAN 


*““What then is the service rendered by Christianity? 
The proclamation of ‘good news.’ And what is that ‘good 
news’? It is the pardon of sin. A God of holiness loving the 
world, and reconciling it to himself by Christ Jesus, in order 
to establish the kingdom, the city of the soul, the life of 
heaven on earth—here we have the whole of it. But this is 
revolution.” —Amiel’s Journal, January 27, 1869. 

“Who can forgive sins but God only?”—Mark i. 7. 

“Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”—Genesis 
evitt. 25. 

“T confessed my transgressions unto the Lord; and thou 
forgivest the iniquity of my sin.”—David, in Psalm xaxii. 5. 


CHAPTER VII 


THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN: GOD’S OPPOR- 
TUNITY WITH MAN 


EVERY approach to the question of evil and its 
offspring, sin in the life of man, has for its justification 
the possibility of the forgiveness of sin and the over- 
throw of evil. Were this not a fact, it were foolish, 
if not a crime, to recognize sin at all. Why tantalize 
a prisoner upon the terrors of his captivity from 
which he can have no escape? Even in pagan myth- 
ology the bound Prometheus found his liberator in 
the person of Hercules, who slew the devouring 
vulture and loosed his chains. Shall we in our 
Christian theology find none to deliver us from sin? 
If sinners can find no forgiveness, then how explain 
the problem of human existence? 

The gracious thought of the forgiveness of sin and 
the redemption of man must have been in the mind 
of God when he conceived the idea of creation and 
said: ‘‘Let us make man in our image.’”’ Both for 
the-well-being of the created soul and the vindication 
of the wisdom and mercy of God, it must have been 
so. For to have created man as we know him— 
namely, a sovereign personality with ability to choose 
the path in which he should go, and thereby acquire 
inborn tendencies, good or bad, and leave him 
without the probability of escape from the conse- 
quences of an unwise choice and without the hope of 
salvation—were indeed a freak of creation unlike the 


10 (145) 


146 A Gospel for the New Age 


doings of our Heavenly Father. Hence the dominant 
idea with God in the hour of creation must have been 
not to create an innocent or pure being only, but a 
possibly holy one as well. In doing this God did not 
stop with the creation of the pure snowflake or the 
innocent lamb, but did infinitely nobler when he 
created man, the possible holy being. 

Holiness, we know, is not a matter of creation, but 
the fruit of sovereign choice; and man alone has the 
ability to choose good rather that evil and to obey 
God rather than self, thus becoming holy and god- 
like. Since holiness is a quality of personality, it 
was not possible for God to create a holy being. 
Man is good and holy or bad and sinful, not because 
of his creation at God’s hands, but because of his 
own choosing and his self-determined character. 
The creation of man under such condition left it the 
prerogative of God to provide against the conse- 
quences of a wrong choice. Hence from all eternity 
God must have planned for the redemption of man 
and the forgiveness of his sins. Such an element 
must have been inwoven in the very character of 
God. 

Man is here, and he has sinned, and sin is an awful 
curse; so we must believe that while God hates sin 
and must punish it he has all the while loved the 
world and cherished in his own consciousness the 
fact that the sinner could be forgiven and redeemed. 
And somehow this redeeming mercy of God stands 
out as the crowning attribute of the infinite Creator. 


“Tt was great to speak a world from naught, 
But greater to redeem.”’ 


Unless there were a redemption from sin and a 


The Forgiveness of Sin 147 


cleansing from evil, however fortunate one might 
be in escaping sorrow and the consequences of sin 
in this present life, eternal life would be a manifest 
calamity and an irreparable blot upon the character 
of the Creator. It would be idle to dream of eternal 
joys after being in this sinful world, if the memories 
of our wrongdoings are to haunt us forever and 
guilty consciences are to be intensified in that holy 
eternity. Without forgiveness death would not bring 
us that rest for which we sigh. Of what avail then 
would the beauties of heaven be—the sight of angels 
and the companionship of the blessed—if, as with 
doomed Dives, there were between us and the blessed 
the impassable gulf of a guilty conscience? Or how 
stand before the throne of God and be happy in the 
light of his holy presence? 

God’s blessed forgiveness cannot bring back the 
forfeited estate of innocence. He cannot undo the 
history of sin; but he can forgive the sinner and, 
through the avenues of this unspeakable gift, open 
to him the pathway of grace leading to the joys of 
the redeemed, a kind of bliss the innocent cannot 
know. The prodigal son went into sin, disgrace, 
and want, and there remembered his father’s house 
of plenty and heart of love, the depths of which he 
had not hitherto discovered. Far be it from us to 
hint even that sin is an essential in the economy of 
God; yet we know that the episode of sin, shameful 
as it is, furnishes an occasion for God to make known 
the depths of redeeming love. }Great and good and 
just and merciful—not because of, but in spite of, 
the world’s wickedness and sin—is our Heavenly 
Father. 


148 A Gospel for the New Age 


That God will not allow sin to go unpunished has 
been demonstrated in all parts of his dominion. For 
him to fail at this point would be for him to show 
himself less than a sovereign God. The same revela- 
tion shows him to be a God of justice and a loving 
Father, welcoming the returning prodigal home. 
This good God could never have been so far pre- 
occupied by and obsessed with maintaining his 
kingdom and preserving the dignity of its laws in 
the punishment of the guilty as to leave unheeded 
the pentitent cry of his erring children. God must 
punish sin; his nature demands this. Yet all sin is 
committed in a world of which God is the righteous 
and gracious ruler and Lord; and while this world 
is God’s realm, it is at the same time the homeland 
of his earthly children and the arena of their pro- 
bationary trials and sorrows. Here God rules in 
righteousness for man’s eternal well-being, and in 
loving-kindness to him he demands righteousness 
and truth between man and man. 

No sin is ever punished by the righteous Ruler 
out of a motive of vengeance or from wrath, but from 
love and as a preventive measure against wrong- 
doing, hence for man’s good. It is man’s benefit and 
ultimate destiny, and not the stern vindication of 
justice, that God is seeking. While he hates sin, he 
loves man and has given a most costly demonstration 
of this fact. ‘‘While we were yet sinners, Christ died 
for us’; yet this same expression of love voiced his 
disapproval of sin. Of all God’s attributes, there 
is none which more sublimely establishes his sov- 
ereignty than this display of divine compassion and 
pardoning grace. ‘“‘Who can forgive sins but God 


The Forgiveness of Sin 149 


only?” This was his prerogative, and only with him 
have we to do; and as a sin-pardoning God he has 
revealed himself. A better method of self-revelation 
has yet to be conceived. The redemption of souls 
and the salvation of the world constitute the highest 
achievements of God on earth. Here all schemes for 
human betterment and social uplift find their source. 
Though man may never penetrate to the depths of 
God’s pardoning love, and a satisfactory philosophy 
of the Atonement may never be written—it has not 
hitherto—yet the fact remains that God does forgive 
sin and cleanse the believing soul, thus establishing 
that at-one-ment with himself which all his redemp- 
tive agencies—the coming of the Messiah, the gift 
of grace, and the Holy Spirit—imply. The saints 
of all ages have given testimony to their personal 
realization of this blessed fact. God has put the 
matter beyond the peradventure of a doubt; for is 
not all nature permeated with the principle of re- 
deeming grace and pardoning love? Has not all 
vigorous life the instinct of self-healing and the 
power of restoration? We see it everywhere. 


A PRECIOUS TRUTH LONG DELAYED 


One of the mysteries of Christian theology is the 
slowness with which the idea of God the Father as 
revealed by Christ has been adopted. The God of 
the Gospels has been long neglected, while the God 
of Roman law has been made most prominent. This 
misfortune may be attributed:to the vocabulary by 
which men have sought to express their thoughts of 
God. For ages men have sought to explain by terms 
of forensic thought how that God can be just, and 


150 A Gospel for the New Age 


the justifier of them that believe on his Son. In so 
doing they have magnified the “‘justice” of God to 
the neglect of his sovereign love. They have gone 
into the courts of justice rather than into the family 
circle to find symbols in which to clothe their idea of 
God; hence they have presented him as a sovereign 
Judge and not, as our Saviour did, as a loving Father. 
However truly such writers may have thought of 
God themselves, they have failed to tell the story in 
a way to meet the demands of the better, saner 
thought of the world. When the New Testament 
was translated into the Latin a word was not found 
to translate the Greek idea of piety toward God, | 
or “‘that which nourishes godliness,” so the word 
‘‘justitia’”’? was used. Our conception of righteous- 
ness or holiness seems not to have been an element 
of the Roman’s religion. With him “justitia”’ was 
the highest quality of religion. So when St. Jerome, 
about A.D. 383, made the translation which is known 
as the “ Vulgate,”’ he used the words, “wt sit cpse 
justus, et justificans eum, qui est ex fide Jesu Christi,’” 
Now the word “‘justifia” has been translated almost 
literally into our English Bible; hence we have God 
presented as the “Justifier”’ of them that believe 
on his Son. The idea seems never to have occurred 
to the translators that the Greek word 8&ixaov had 
any such meaning as to make righteous or holy, 
which is the true Gospel use of the word. So that 
in place of giving us the deeply religious idea of a 
holy, righteous God, making holy or righteous those 
who believe on Jesus, as we know true faith to op- 


‘Romans iii. 26, 


The Forgiveness of Sin 151 


erate to-day, theology got the forensic idea of a 
Judge demanding justice in the vindication of laws 
violated. With this idea in mind great theologians 
have gone forth to find how God could “justify” 
the ungodly. They have attempted to balance 
affairs in the scales of eternal justice. Seeing that 
sin produced suffering, and assuming that suffering 
was God’s penalty for guilt, they reached the con- 
clusion that “‘so much suffering for so much sin” 
was well-pleasing to God—that by this suffering, 
borne by the proper one, God would be “‘placated”’ 
(pleased) and “propitiated’”’ (made more pitiful). 
These are the stock terms of theology as it has been 
handed down to us to-day. By this method of inter- 
pretation many precious teachings of the Scriptures 
have been twisted from their true meaning, and God 
presented to a prodigal world, not as waiting Father 
and blessed companion whom the soul might gladly 
seek, but an august Ruler from whom the soul might 
well escape. This theology overlooked the funda- 
mental fact that ‘‘God so loved the world, that he 
gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever be- 
lieveth in him should not perish’; and saw “the 
wrath of God against sin nailing his beloved Son to 
the cross,” thinking that in the suffering of his cruci- 
fied Son God would “see of the travail of his [Christ’s] 
soul, and be satisfied,” and thus by the prepon- 
derance of suffering the sins of the world might be 
“‘atoned for” and mankind be redeemed. Is it not 
amazing that anyone could think that God would 
bless such an un-Christlike presentation of his nature 
and works? This for a thousand years has been pre- 
sented to the world as God’s method of atonement, 


152 A Gospel for the New Age 


It seems never to have occurred to earlier writers 
that “God was in Christ Jesus reconciling the world 
unto himself,” that it was God who was in travail 
of suffering and anguish, that every sin committed 
sends a shaft to the heart of God, that from all 
eternity God has carried in his heart the great love 
wherewith he so loved the world. Was this the 
Being to be balancing so much suffering against so 
much sin in order to find a motive for pardoning his 
repenting children? Shall we speak of the sovereignty 
of the love of God and proceed at once to bind that 
love in chains of inexorable laws? This we do, not 
thinking how that in using words we mar the idea 
of God by making the Author of all laws to be him- 
self the slave of forensic laws. If by suffering or any 
other “‘placating’”’ process one might ‘‘propitiate”’ 
the divine mind and thereby furnish a motive for the 
redemption of mankind, that were indeed to vitiate 
the very truth sought to be established in the gospel 
of Christ—namely, the gracious forgiveness of a re- 
pentant sinner as the sovereign act of a merciful God. 

By what method can the unchanging mind of God 
be propitiated—made more pitiful? Must the in- 
finite, perfect God be spoken of in such terms? If 
by some mysterious process all the demands of 
Eternal Justice could be satisfied, and the guilty 
thereby go free, could that by the laws of right 
thinking be called a “pardon”? Justification it 
might be, but gracious forgiveness never! “Suppose 
it were possible to explain God’s motive for for- 
giving the sinner by saying that his guilt had been 
legally transferred to Christ on the Cross, and the 
merits of Christ had been legally transferred to him, 


The Forgiveness of Sin 153 


so that the crucified Christ was declared legally 
guilty and punished in the sinner’s stead, while the 
believing sinner is pronounced legally righteous and 
goes from punishment, what effect would such an 
idea have upon the inner life of man? Apart from the 
frightful confusion it would introduce into the moral 
realm to think of God as the author of such an idea, 
what conceivable influence for good would such an 
idea have upon the soul? Does it bring inward 
peace to a man’s soul to be declared innocent or 
righteous when he knows that in reality he is not? 
Does it reconcile a man’s inner life to God to have 
the merits of another attributed to him by a legal 
fiction, while his own soul is out of harmony with 
God?’? There is no room for what Phillips Brooks 
calls “‘the fantastic conception of the imputation to 
Christ of a sinfulness which was never his, of God 
counting him guilty of wickedness which he had 
never done.” 

The human mind revolts at the punishment of the 
innocent for the guilty. Those instincts which lie 
deeper than reason are insulted by the thought of 
transferring the merits of one to the credit of another. 
The moral sense could never find peace in the con- 
templation of such a forensic and fanciful trans- 
action. It is totally unlike the loving Heavenly 
Father. 

CHRIST’S IDEA OF GOD 


At whatever cost in giving up old opinions for new 
truths, let us not fail to grasp the idea of God as 
taught by Christ in the Gospels, and hold to that 


Gospel for a World of Sin,”” Van Dyke, p. 120. (The 
Macmillan Co.) 


154 A Gospel for the New Age 


under all circumstances. Christ’s high mission to 
earth was for the sole purpose of being, himself, 
a revelation of God, the Father incarnate. While 
this ‘‘revelation’”’ may have traversed all other con- 
ceptions of God, and its adoption may spoil some of 
our fond theories, this alone is truth and must 
prevail. All else must fade and be forgotten. 

With this in mind as a central thought we may 
hope to find the solution of many of life’s problems, 
as well as to unfold the promise of the future. If we 
wish to determine God’s attitude toward certain 
issues—toward evil, toward sin and human redemp- 
tion—let us learn what Christ taught on such ques- 
tions; for he said: ‘‘I and my Father are one.” 
Wherever Christ was found or whatever his teach- 
ings—in the temple, in the wilderness temptations, 
on the holy mount, in the upper room, in Pilate’s 
hall—he is there revealing the Father. In the parable 
of the prodigal and his father, which feature is made 
most prominent, the father’s vengeance or his loving 
mercy? In the garden and on the cross, Christ would 
die rather than make a false revelation of his Father. 
To this death he is constrained by love, not driven 
by vindictive justice. (John iii. 16.) 

While we may never know the full measure of the 
power back of all this, we know what it means to the 
world and to our own hearts—namely, God as our 
merciful Heavenly Father, who woos us, redeems us, 
and takes us to his own embrace. Deductions from 
this Christian experience, together with a careful 
study of the Bible, have not only given us a better 
understanding of Christ, but a truer view of God. 
These have shown us that God the Father is no 


The Forgiveness of Sin 155 


arbitrary sovereign merely; that all that Christ was 
God is, and has always been; that “‘God is as good 
as Christ’’; that the proper sovereignty of God is a 
sovereignty of grace and not of power or holiness as 
an abstraction unmodified by love in the sense of 
benevolence and clemency. 

The whole Deity is a suffering Deity, is an atoning 
Deity; and the Father as well as the Son takes upon 
himself the burden of the sin problem of the world. 
The mediation of Christ has not the least relation to 
the willingness of God to save. The term “placate”’ 
has to do with disposition; and when applied to God 
in his attitude toward the sinner, it is a myth. 
While the atonement as a vicario-vital fact is a modern 
conception, it isa true one. With it also has come the 
conception that the propitiation of Christ was a 
divine self-propitiation; and when this term is used 
by St. Paul it implies rather a fact of revelation, and 
not an inducement brought to bear upon God to 
persuade him to be merciful and to save. It is the 
story of what Christ was—what he endured and what 
his spirit was on the Cross—that does more when 
rightly told than anything else to make plain to the 
world the true idea of God and to win mankind 
from sin. This is the light which clears the fog from 
our spiritual sky and makes beautiful many of our 
religious problems which were dark and repulsive. 


Not A CAST-IRON DEITY 


“God is no cast-iron deity, equally unmoved 
whether his creatures sin or not. Jesus was never 
more loving or more divine than when he stood on 
Olivet with outstretched hands toward Jerusalem 


156 A Gospel for the New Age 


and wept over the city that knew not the day of its 
merciful visitation. When sin entered the world, 
pain entered the heart of God, Christ brought that 
suffering to our view so that we could see and ap- 
preciate it.’’s 

The charge is sometimes made against Christianity 
that it is a bloody religion, that it glories in that 
which should be a shame to any right-minded person 
—namely, that he had escaped a just penalty due 
to his sins by having it laid on another and an 
innocent one. ‘Such is a misrepresentation,” says 
Bishop Coke Smith, “‘of the great fact of salvation 
through Jesus Christ. He suffered no penalty as a 
guilty one. He was not conscious of sin; he did not 
die to pay a debt to the devil or to appease the anger 
of the Father. It was not a governmental proviso 
by which the divine sovereignty was saved from 
wreck and dishonor. It was no commercial arrange- 
ment by which there was a transfer of debt from one 
party to another. Sin had not generated a certain 
amount of wrath in God which leaped from his hand 
indifferent as to whether it fell upon the head of the 
guilty man or upon the innocent Son of God. Such 
conceptions of the work of Christ find no warrant 
in the word of God. There was no schism in the 
Trinity which was healed by the superior goodness 
of One. Christians glory in the Cross, not because 
of the sufferings it displays as an end, but because of 
the love which would dare all suffering in order to 
save the loved one exposed to danger.’’ 


3Methodist Quarterly Review, 1903, p. 222. 
4Tbid., page 224. 


The Forgiveness of Sin 157 


ONLY LOVE CAN FORGIVE 


Age after age men have gone on saying that by 
his sovereign prerogative, and purely from an im- 
pulse of mercy, God cannot forgive the repenting 
sinner; when as a matter of simple fact and undying 
truth, this is the only ground upon which forgiveness 
is at all possible. Eternal Justice could never for- 
give. It could declare judgment, award merit, 
adjust penalty, and maintain equity. Were there 
only justice in the character of God there could be no 
redemption for sinful man. This is the work of 
sovereign Love, manifest in the infinite mercy of God. 
Salvation, therefore, which means eternal life, is the 
free gift of God! On conditions which he has made 
known, his love is bestowed and his pardoning grace 
is received; and no sacrificial act of any kind, not 
even the death of his “well-beloved Son, in whom 
he was well pleased,” could have changed the heart 
of God and made him one whit more willing and 
anxious to forgive than from all eternity he has been. 
This God whom we saw manifesting himself in 
Christ Jesus, reconciling the world unto himself, can 
and does forgive sin and redeem sinners who through 
faith are made holy and right with himself. This 
cleansing and making holy is that at-one-ment which 
is at the center of all salvation and which Christ 
lived and suffered and died to make known and to 
accomplish. Blessed estate, at one with God be- 
cause made fit to be in harmony with him, cleansed 
and kept by the power of God through faith in his 
Son! Apart from this cleansed condition, and with 
the soul steeped in sin, there can be no at-one-ment, 


158 A Gospel for the New Age 


and any theory of the atonement which leaves this 
out presents a travesty upon the truth. 


A Most BLESSED MEMORY 


The soul in which this divine reality has been 
accomplished has felt an experience which towers 
above and overshadows all other memories. A 
patient, on convalescing, may in the joy he feels 
over returning health well “forget” the suffering and 
pain through which he has just passed. So the for- 
given sinner, in the great joy he feels over being re- 
deemed from sin and made whole again, does ‘‘for- 
get”? his former sinful state. To all eternity this 
blessed reality will be the cherished consciousness 
and golden memory of every transported soul. The 
unnumbered hosts in glory are the “redeemed of 
the Lord,” and the theme of their celestial rejoicing 
will ever be: ‘‘Saved and made holy, washed in the 
blood of the Lamb.” 

No man, not even the great Apostle, could literally 
forget that he was once a sinner, but “saved by 
grace.” This was St. Paul’s majestic theme. ‘‘Saved 
and made holy,” “ By grace are ye saved,” *‘ Free from 
the law of sin and death,” ‘‘ Let us walk in newness of 
life with him’’—these were terms often upon his 
lips, because the theme was ever as a flame aglow 
in his heart. The same God who has power to create 
and sustain life has power also to renew it, to trans- 
form sad memories into glad ones, to change the 
soul’s sad theme into the rapturous consciousness 
of a redeemed life of love and joy and peace. The 
“glory of God in Christ Jesus” lights up all the dark 
recesses of sin’s memories in the soul, and makes 


The Forgiveness of Sin 159 


them to glow with the eternal light of the redeeming 
love of God. The more distressing the path of sin 
through which the sinner has passed, the more 
exulting the joy he feels over the fact that God has 
saved him out of it all and has “put a new song in 
his mouth,” even praises to the Lord. 

The doctrine of divine forgiveness and being 
cleansed from sin is not stressed and not realized as 
it should be to-day, yet no fact of religion is more 
real and no experience more blessed. ‘‘That God 
has power on earth to forgive sins’ has been testified 
to by millions of saved souls in all the ages. They 
vie with King David in saying: “I confessed my 
transgressions unto the Lord; and thou forgavest the 
iniquity of my sin.” The consciousness of souls 
cleansed and made right with God is the fountain 
of all their joys and the beginning of the hope of 
everlasting life. What a blessed experience may 
flow from this divine fountain! ‘‘ Having been made 
free from sin, and become servants to God, we have 
our fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life.” 

While the Scriptures make no distinction between 
the forgiveness of sin and the cleansing of the soul 
unto holiness, yet, for the sake of convenience in 
treatment, we speak of forgiveness of sin as God’s 
side of salvation—and thus far we have discussed 
God’s ability and willingness to forgive the repentant 
sinner. There is a human side to salvation, with all 
its joyous strength and victorious hope. God has 
done and will do all that is consistent with his nature 
to redeem and save souls, yet man, as a sovereign 
being, has his part to perform, and without his own 
codéperation he must forfeit all God’s gracious gifts. 





CHAPTER VIII 


THE NEW LIFE FROM ABOVE: THE HOPE OF 
HUMANITY 
(11) 


JACOB REDEEMED 


‘Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him 
until the breaking of the day. . . . And he said, Let me 
go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee 
go, except thou bless me. And he said unto him, What is 
thy name? And he said, Jacob. And he said, Thy name 
shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel; for as a prince hast 
thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed. . . . 
And Jacob called the name of the place ‘‘Peniel’’; for I have 
seen God face to face, and my life is preserved. And as he 
passed over Peniel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon 
his thigh’’—a crushed humanity, but a glorified soul. There 
his life began.—Genesis xxvii. 24-31. 


CHAPTER VIII 


‘THE NEW LIFE FROM ABOVE: THE HOPE 
OF HUMANITY 


WITH sympathetic approach, rather than an- 
tagonism, there is no reason why the evolutionary 
theory of the origin and development of life on earth 
might not be a stanch ally rather than a foe to 
Christianity. The Christian postulate of spiritual 
life is summarized in the statement of our Lord 
when he said, “‘I am come that they might have 
life, and that they might have it more abundantly”’ ;! 
and this gift of abundant life was implied in the state- 
ment: ‘‘ Except a man be born again, he cannot see 
the kingdom of God.’’? Science in the evolutionary 
theory of nature’s progress sees a higher order of life 
appearing with each advancing species, but rejects 
the “‘intrusion of an outer creative Force.”’ Christi- 
anity, on the other hand, finds here a scientific basis 
ample for spiritual generation. Here is the avenue of 
life from above; here the crisis of the “more abundant 
life!’ Without this “‘intrusion”’ of a creative Power 
from without, this impartation of a greater life, the 
“gift of life from above,’’ how can we account for 
evolution at all? Nature cannot evolve that which 
is not involved. Every result must have an adequate 
cause. Without the divine impulse, how could there 
be any progressive life, how get the greater from the 
less? With no ‘outward creative Force,” how get 


‘John x.10. *John iii. 3. 
(163) 


164 A Gospel for the New Age 


the animate from the inanimate, mind from matter, 
soul from animal life? Eagles cannot be hatched 
from owl eggs. Hx nihilo nihil fit. 

The instinctive longing of the lesser, the poten- 
tiality and the progressive attainment unto the higher 
life, is in proof of a greater outer Force or Life 
waiting to bestow the greater gift implied in the 
instinctive longing (as in our Christian religion), the 
“life from above,” the higher life of freedom, suf- 
ficiency, peace, and love. Granting that all religious 
phenomena, even to salvation and soulhood, “are 
potential in the sunlight,” is it not a fact that at every 
step of the way in that marvelous unfolding, from 
the nebulous state, every new species, every greater 
life, even to the crown of eternal life, has been and 
ever shall be the “gift of God,” or the intrusion of an 
outside Force? 


THE OLD LIFE A BONDAGE 


The inherent longing of normal soul for freedom, 
for the privilege of living his own life and developing 
his own personality in a manner best suited to him- 
self, is itself an inspiration,” a reaching out for a 
better and higher life. Such an instinct is discovered 
very early in childhood, and we never outlive that 
longing. The development of personality would be 
simple were it not for certain influences which seem 
at times to rival all other forces. Every man feels 
instinctively that he is not entirely free, and his 
bondage in not of his own making. His life is not 
satisfactory, his mind is not entirely clear, he cannot 
trust his better impulses, and he longs for some sort 
of transformation. Whatever be the cause of this 


The New Life from Above 165 


defeat, or by whatever name we call it, man feels that 
it alienates him from God 

There is no necessity for the continuation of this 
alienation from God. All Christianity stands pledged 
for its removal and the restoration of the soul’s 
harmony with its Maker. The fact that the alien- 
ating cause lies deep in the nature of man does not 
argue its eternal fixture there. The fact alone of the 
depths of man’s imperfection calls for a divine 
remedial agency, and this is the ground for the offer 
of God’s mercy and love. God’s gift of blessed son- 
ship with himself rests upon man’s deep need of 
just such a relation, and this offer is God’s guarantee 
of the possible removal of that sense of servitude to 
sin which every unsaved man must feel. To deny 
such a soul-restoration and rob man of the freedom 
which he craves most of all, would make that craving 
the most mysterious something in all God’s dealings 
with mankind. The development of God’s plans for 
man implies the unfolding of his personality; but 
this may be entirely defeated by man’s failure to 
comply with necessary conditions. 


How ACCOMPLISH THE RELIEF? 


The difficulty remains: how to break the “‘fasci- 
nation of the old life’’ over the soul and let it go free 
to live the new, higher life. It will not suffice to seek 
such a radical change in a mere suggestion, or some 
pathetic memory, or in some flash of danger, as do 
Stevens and Snowden in their Psychology. Such 
a change is not merely a moral reform, but is realized 
by voluntarily turning to God and laying hold upon 
him. In this act the soul passes from the condition 


166 A Gospel for the New Age 


of estrangement or indifference to one of interest and 
friendship and trust, which will involve in many 
lives a complete revolution; but the moral revolu- 
tion is not ‘‘conversion,”’ but the result of it, the 
result of the new life from above. This comes of the 
acceptance of God’s offer of mercy, of new life and 
love, and the surrender of the whole life. God has 
many agencies of mercy, many avenues of approach 
to the soul, many voices by which he can speak; 
but in them all God is “intruding” into human life, 
the Spirit speaking for Christ to the spiritual nature 
of man, awaking it, though dead asleep and helpless, 
and giving it power to arise and step up into the 
higher life for which it has so strangely longed, 
though unwittingly. 

While the “life from above” establishes a new 
personal relation with God, whatever the producing 
cause may be, it all depends upon the interest man 
takes in his own spiritual life. His new relationship 
with God must arise from some new conception of 
the nature of God. As a sinner he resisted God, no 
doubt because he fancied that God was against his 
life. He hated God because he knew that God con- 
demned his sins. Somehow this estranged soul must 
be made to understand God, to see his love and mercy 
and his heart stirred to love God. How can this be 
done? Both the revelation of God’s true character 
and the winning of the heart to God must come 
through a Person. Christianity is the relationship 
of Personalities—the Personality of Christ to that of 
man—and this relationship is God’s means of be- 
stowing “new life’”’ and restoring soul freedom. 


The New Life from Above 167 


THE HOPE OF HUMANITY 


It was a truism with St. Paul that, “‘If any man 
be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are 
passed away; behold, all things are become new.’’? 
And this moral transformation of the individual is 
the deepest foundation for the hope of humanity. 
This has been the supreme interest of great preachers 
and reformers in all ages of Christianity. But was 
this interest a mere whim of fancy of a religious cult 
to be forgotten and fade? What does it mean? 
Is it not the calling of the individual soul to go free 
from the bondage of the old life and to live under the 
sovereignty of a soul transformed and upheld by the 
Spirit of God? Does it not mean the victorious 
assertion in the name of Christ of moral manhood 
over brutehood, of soul over sensuality? 

Who ean believe that the unregenerated life as 
we see it to-day is the kind of life God intended that 
man should live, created as he was, in the image of 
his Maker? We believe in reality that such a thought 
would be equivalent to impeaching the wisdom and 
goodness of our Creator. Then who can believe 
that a God of love would have created a moral being 
free to choose for himself, even though wrongly, and 
not provide a way by which that being might re- 
trieve himself when once a wrong choice had been 
made? From this point of view the moral trans- 
formation of man becomes a necessity. 


NoT A RELIGIOUS FICTION 


The high reality of this moral transformation as a 
religious experience and a distinctive feature of 


82 Corinthians v. 17. 


168 A Gospel for the New Age 


Christianity should stand first in the category of 
religious phenomena. In the teachings of our Lord 
it takes first rank. In the philosophy of religion it 
can stand nowhere else, since it is the fountainhead 
of all religious experience. But what place does it 
hold in the popular thought of to-day? It is a fact 
that in many religious circles it is a lost experience 
already to many. Nor has the Church at all times 
in her history treated it as a vital doctrine, despite 
the fact that regeneration is the bedrock of Chris- 
tianity. So decidedly new and vital was it at the 
time of Christ that he must needs coin a term to 
clothe the unique truth, hence the word ‘“‘new 
birth.” A better term could scarcely be imagined. 
Real religion is a personal consciousness, and at 
whatever time of life that consciousness may be felt 
its beginning is ‘‘new life” in the soul. 

This transforming work may take place very 
early in life, as it should, and at the time be a very 
simple process which leads up to a normal and 
beautiful Christian experience. Yet the time of 
such soul transformation must have come, the time 
of personal willing and deliberate choice in commit- 
ting the soul to Christ, to remain his, to be fashioned 
after his own image. While it may not be possible 
always to tell exactly when the transformation takes 
place—with some it is with the calm stealth of the 
morning dawn—the “‘divine intrusion” at some time 
must have occurred or Christianity would be an 
impossibility. “Marvel not,” said our Saviour, 
“‘that I said unto thee, Ye must be bornagain. ... 
For except a man be born from above, he cannot see 
the kingdom of God.” 


i 


The New Life from Above 169 


{s it at all strange, then, that where this doctrine is 
ignored or treated lightly the individual life is a 
religious failure? When the first essential is missing, 
how can the rest be perfect? Why is it that the 
doctrine has been so often and so long treated so 
lightly? Why have the scientists who are so quick 
to snatch up new facts, and are so untiring in other 
fields of research, shown such indifference to the 
phenomena of the spiritual nature of man and the 
power which frees him from his bondage? This is a 
major experience which is occurring daily somewhere, 
and the evidence is as available as any with which 
science deals; its processes are as explicable—rather 
inexplicable—yet science seems not to consider the 
facts. Why should it not be the aim of scientific 
theology to study the experience and lay in the lap 
of Christianity its powerful witness? 

This seeming indifference of secular scientists to 
the great question is due no doubt to the fact that 
they feel that the phenomena of soul transforma- 
tion, being of a spiritual nature, not a tangible thing, 
lie beyond the radius of their research. By many 
this silence is considered most consistent; for since 
“‘spiritual things are spiritually discerned,” the at- 
tempt of the cold, unsympathetic scientist to carry 
his research into the realm of the spiritual would be 
to grope and blunder; and no one should be more 
conscious of this than the scientists themselves. 

But why so many religious writers, who should be 
past masters in the secrets of religion, should have 
so little to say on the subject of conversion is indeed 
surprising. That some ‘‘enthusiasts’”’ have carried 
the doctrine to extremes, thereby rendering the 


170 A Gospel for the New Age 


subject distasteful to some, does not exclude the 
doctrine from the realm of things allowable, but 
calls all the more for careful investigation so as to 
establish its eternal verity. In discussing it we do not 
speak the language of a cult, the dialect of a province, 
the light parlance of a clan; but the spiritual mother 
tongue of the kingdom whose speech tells of the 
mighty works of God which are essential to the hope 
of humanity. 

In spite of the slights of some and the abuse of 
others, the phenomena of conversion stand as a rock 
against which the waves of adverse criticism lash 
in vain. As a fortress it cannot be overthrown. 
How solve the problem of human existence without 
it—how “justify the ways of God to men’? Evil 
is in the world, and man has fallen a victim to its 
power. God, in creating, must have foreseen the 
possibility of sinning and the calamity it must bring 
to man, and in divine mercy must have planned to 
absolve him from the consequences of sin and lift 
him up into a higher, holier life. In the realization 
of this man is but discovering his destined atmos- 
phere, while God is coming to his own. In highest 
truth, regeneration is the hope of humanity. To 
ignore it is to run counter to the teachings of our 
Lord and to set at naught the wisdom of the All-wise 
Creator. 

A FLEXIBLE MATTER 


In the matter of terminology the Scriptures, in 
this doctrine as with others, deals more with the 
spirit than with the letter. There is no scientific 
exactness in the terms used. ‘‘ Regeneration,” ‘The 
spiritual resurrection,” “Born again,” are the terms 


The New Life from Above 171 


most generally used. W. N. Clarke was of opinion 
that “‘regeneration should be the favored word for 
describing, from the divine side, the beginning of the 
Christian experience.”’ But there is a human side, 
and it is this that we would wish most to consider. 
The producing agency is not all; the experience as a 
dynamic in the life of mankind is the principal 
thing; and we are sure that it was in this wider 
sense that our Saviour spoke when, in his night talk 
with Nicodemus, he said: ‘‘ Ye must be born again.” 
It can readily be seen why he laid such stress on the 
great doctrine, since it is the genesis of the Christian 
life. Without it the soul must remain spiritually 
dead. In the matter of the soul’s destiny where is 
there a subject of greater importance? Though it 
is an experience which varies as widely as the tem- 
peraments of men, and we cannot lay down hard and 
fast rules for its working—with some the experience 
is brief, clear, and sweet, while with others it is 
gradual and of a more quiet nature—yet this is a 
vast venture to be made in committing the soul into 
the hands of Christ for God and eternity, and in 
taking the Almighty One into deepest being, there 
to reign supreme forever. 





CHAPTER IX 


NO FIXED LAW IN CONVERSION 


“‘When I first visited that home there stood the woman 
clad in unwomanly rags, with the mark of a brutal fist upon 
her face, and three ill-clad children clinging to her skirts, 
‘Excuse the children running from you. They thought it was 
their father.’ If I were a painter, I should like to paint you a 
picture of that home as I saw it a year later, on a Sunday 
afternoon. They had moved out of the hovel into a cottage 
up on Main Street. There sat the father by the fire with his 
three bairns who had run away from me a year ago. One 
was on his knee, one on his shoulder, and another standing 
by him. I never heard sweeter music than was made by the 
kettle on the hob that day. The woman who a year ago was 
in rags was clothed, and the smile of love was in her face. 
Why this difference? Her husband had been converted.”— 
Rev. G. Campbell Morgan. 

“‘T know that I was converted better than I know any other 
fact in the world.” —Evangelist Sam P. Jones. 


CHAPTER IX 
NO FIXED LAW IN CONVERSION 


ONE of the most difficult things for men to realize 
is the fact that real religion cannot be reduced to set, 
literal forms. He who attempts to do this with 
the Bible is the worst foe of Christianity. Our 
Saviour nowhere reduces his teachings to dead scien- 
tific statements. Even when teaching his disciples 
to pray, in dictating the famous ‘‘Lord’s Prayer,” 
he did not mean to tie all Christians up to praying 
in those exact words always, hence he said: “After 
this manner pray ye.”’ Men have tried to state the 
great Bible truths in exact form, such as is found in 
the Westminster Catechism, only to find that by 
so doing they were but making garments for dead 
statements rather that garbs for living truths. St. 
Paul’s laconic statement, “‘The letter killeth, but 
the spirit giveth life,’’ has never lost its force. Life 
will not submit to being bound, but is ever vital; 
and Christianity is such a life, spontaneous and free. 
Conversion, therefore, as the first expression of real 
personal religion, may be expected to manifest just 
such peculiarities; and there is nothing strange in 
the fact that no two conversions are exactly alike 
any more than there is in that no two individuals are 
the same. Yet with all their variations the different 
conversions can be as real as religion itself. While 
the Scriptures give us one account of a spectacular 
surrender—Saul of Tarsus—there is no such con- 

(175) 


176 A Gospel for the New Age 


version recorded of the sweet-spirited John, the 
“beloved disciple,’’ whom we may call the ideal 
Christian. 

Conversion is God’s work, and he does it in his 
own good way. ‘The forgiveness of sin and the 
cleansing of the soul of its guilt are no small matter, 
even if we could understand all the process. But 
we cannot; and since it is a matter not of knowledge 
but of fazth, a child can receive it-as well as an adult. 
We must recognize, therefore, three different types 
of conversion: (1) Childhood Conversion, (2) In- 
stantaneous Conversion, and (8) Gradual Conver- 
sion. Each has its distinctive features, but they all 
lead up to the same final crisis—namely, the gift 
of the soul to God and the finding of a home in the 
- fold of the Good Shepherd, crowned by a sweet and 
blessed life. 

1. CHILDHOOD CONVERSION 

There is nothing more beautiful and consistent 
than the coming of a well-taught child into the king- 
dom of heaven in the morning of life. While not so 
spectacular as conversion after a season of sinning, 
yet it is the more normal and should be all the more 
common. It recognizes the claims of God to the 
entire life, and may spare the child untold sorrows 
and dangers in after life. Besides, is this not what 
the Scriptures mean when it is said, “‘Bring up a 
child in the way he should go’’? or “‘Suffer the little 
children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for 
of such is the kingdom of God’’? 

Our Lord here sets no limit as to age, nor does he 
imply that children should wait till they can ‘‘under- 
stand the step they are taking.” Nor is there a hint 


No Fixed Law in Conversion 177 


that the conversion of a child is not in direct line 
with God’s plans of human life or that the child 
cannot be religious. The facts are on the side of 
the child. Religion begun in childhood is evidently 
God’s approved way. 


Does a Child Need Conversion? 


This is one of the serious questions of present- 
day Christianity. To ask it is to reveal directly 
the existence of one of our common invading evils. 
Yet to ask it of one brought up in the atmosphere 
of evangelism seems foolish. As well ask, Did I 
myself need conversion? or, Did Christ include all - 
ages in life in his great declaration, ‘‘Ye must be 
born again’’? 

The denial of the child’s need of conversion re- 
veals not only the lack of a right understanding of 
our unsaved human nature, but it seems to imply 
that God did not intend the soul to be regenerated, 
unless first degenerated by a life of rebellion. Little 
do we dream of the general prevalence of the idea 
that conversion is the parlance of a clan, and in 
general is superfluous. This opinion has not only 
crept into the beliefs of many of our orthodox 
Churches, but is in fact world-wide in its insidious- 
ness. Recently a representative of the “Religious 
Young Men of the Orient,’ while addressing an 
audience in Chicago, said: ‘We believe that man is 
sufficient of himself, if, as you say, a perfect God 
created him. If you will let him alone, he will be all 
that he should be. Educate him, train him, but do 
not bind him hand and foot, and he will be a perfect 
man, worthy to be brother to any man. Nature 

12 


178 A Gospel for the New Age 


has sufficiently endowed him, and he should use all 
that has been given him in intelligence before he 
trouble God for more. We have all the inspiration 
we want in sweet poetry and enchanting music and 
in the companionship of cultivated men and women.” 
The speaker was a member of the Greek Catholic 
Church. 

This was said in controverting the doctrine of 
regeneration and the need of the Holy Spirit. In 
the course of his address the speaker let fall the secret 
that the source of his inspiration was Teutonic 
rather that Scriptural. But coming back to the 
fact of human ability, he further said: ‘‘But when 
it comes to the following of our conception of that 
which is right and noble, that which is high and neces- 
sary for our development, we are wariting in strength 
and power to advance toward it. The fact is as real 
as the dignity of man, that there is a power which 
diverts mankind from the path of rectitude and 
honor, in which they know that they should walk. 
If you have a religion to bring to the young man of 
the Orient, it must come with a power to balance— 
yea, to counter balance—the power of evil in the 
world. Then will man be free to grow up and be 
what God intended him to be. We want God. 
We want the Spirit of God. Any religion which 
leaves that out is for us as no religion.” 

Notice that the two statements of the speaker 
were plainly contradictory. In the first the boast 
of human ability was plainly “cultural,” while in 
the second, in which the want of “‘strength and power 
to advance toward high and noble things” was ad- 
mitted, we can plainly hear the heart’s cry of con- 


No Fixed Law in Conversion 179 


viction. No amount of sophistry can take away 
from man the consciousness of the frailties of his 
great nature. This should be kept constantly in 
mind. A lack of knowledge or sincerity here is most 
dangerous. 

Some very pious and well-meaning souls think 
that conversion was intended only for the viciously 
inclined and that unfortunate class whose religious 
training has been neglected and who allowed them- 
selves to drift off into sin. They think that all some 
children need is good environment and careful 
training in order to grow up Christians. Yet noth- 
ing could be farther from the truth and more detri- 
mental to the child. Let it not be forgotten that © 
while all human agencies are helpful and at times 
powerful factors in shaping the destiny of the child, 
yet more than a human cultural agency is needed. 
Good environment and a pious home life every 
child should have; but the real unregenerated nature 
of the child should not be overlooked. While some 
children are more gentle and susceptible to religion 
than others, every child belongs to the fallen human 
family, and no unregenerated soul is ever safe. ‘‘We 
dare not trust the sweetest frame.’”’ The tempter 
lurks by every rose-strewn path; and they who re- 
fuse to admit this deceive themselves most of all. 
To leave the child untaught at this point is next to 
criminal negligence, 

Yet we find in the “‘School of Religion” in one of 
our foremost universities men speaking with all the 
enthusiasm of a specialist, who do not hold with the 
old theologians that the child is completely under 
the curse of original sin, nor yet believe with certain 


180 A Gospel for the New Age 


sentimentalists that he “comes trailing clouds of 
glory,”’ but who emphasize the fact that the child 
has infinite latent possibilities for good or evil, 
either of which may be developed. ‘“‘We know,” 
say they, “‘that at the beginning the child is sinless, 
pure of heart, and with life undefiled’—without 
moral record. This awakens us to our duty, which 
is to teach the child, as they say, until he is old enough 
to follow the right path of his own accord, thus 
grounding him in right habits and motives which 
lead to a righteous life, turning his whole being to 
seeking accord with the Divine will. The process, 
be it noticed, is entirely human. 

In these few words is stated the leading religious 
teaching of to-day. This we recognize as “‘fanciful,” 
for does it not leave out of sight the one essential 
of the Christian life, ‘‘the new creature in Christ 
Jesus’? ‘Enabling power” is something all men 
need. Man is weak as well as wicked. He cannot 
of himself attain unto the higher life. Hence our 
Saviour taught his doctrine of the “new birth.” 
Wise parents will do all in their power to throw good 
influences around their children. They know the 
molding influence of environment; but they will not 
deceive themselves in believing that their children 
do not need the redeeming grace of God. However 
consecrated they themselves may be, they know 
that righteousness is not transmittible. We may 
trust a hyacinth to produce its like and a rosebush 
to bear roses; but this natural law does not pertain 
in the moral world. From the homes of as saintly 
parents as live have gone forth children to follow the 
path of sin and become God-despising. We dare 


No Fixed Law in Conversion 181 


not rely on family or blood or cultured social in- 
fluence. These have all been tried and have failed. 

Anyone who has had intimate knowledge of 
boys knows how early in life many of them develop 
tricky and selfish tendencies. While there is a great 
difference in children from different grades of society, 
yet they all show that they are human; and with us 
all life is a constant struggle against evil. Let this 
struggle cease and all is lost. There is no trouble in 
the development of vice. The development of 
virtue is the race task, and to do this we all need the 
“new affection” and the “‘new nature.” Just as 
the wild tree must have the engrafted new bud to 
produce the improved fruit, so humanity must have 
the “‘gift of God”’ to live holy lives. Deny this and 
we deny humanity’s need of a Saviour and his re- 
demption, and we might as well burn our Bibles, 
close our churches, and stop all gospel effort. To 
deny humanity’s need of divine grace would be to 
run counter to the plain teachings of our Lord and 
the common experience of mankind. The child 
needs the help of divine grace just as a flower needs 
the sunshine to grow fragrance and beauty. Being 
trained up in the atmosphere of religion and having 
been wisely taught the ways of salvation, it is as 
natural for the child to step into the kingdom of 
God as it is for him to go from childhood into man- 
hood. Thus having been trained in holy living and 
habituated in the ways of religious thoughts and 
ideals, he is fortified against the invading evils of 
the day. From this class the Church gathers her 
most reliable recruits and lifelong supporters. 


182 A Gospel for the New Age 


When Should the Christian Life Begin? 


No exact date can be set for the beginning of re- 
ligious development in the child. Certainly no 
time should be lost of the precious hours of the morn- 
ing of life. Much depends upon the atmosphere of 
the home. Here the religious life of the mother 
counts for everything. ‘“‘If the home is the heart 
of the world,” surely the mother is the heart of the 
home. Home is what she makesit, and the characters 
formed there are largely of her shaping. About the 
Christian home there hovers the prestige of a 
thousand years of Christian civilization. This the 
mother can combine with the influence of her own 
religious life in forming the life of her child. All 
this a mother brings to her child when she dedicates 
it to her Lord, breathes her tender love into it, prays 
and weeps over it till it crystallizes in the image of 
Christ. Only thus can she hope to build up a char- 
acter strong enough to resist the charms of sensuous 
nature and escape the corruption of the world 
through lust. From the mother the child imbibes 
its first ideas of God. If we were nursed at the breast 
of apes, we would all be savages. It is mother’s 
God we learn to love. Mother’s knee is the child’s 
first altar, her religion is its creed, and her heaven 
the home of the soul. With what profound energy 
then should we defend the home against the inroads 
of present-day disregard of things religious, and es- 
tablish more firmly the realm of motherhood as the 
stronghold of civilization. Here civilization lives 
or dies. 

If the world is ever to be saved at all, it will have 
to be saved in youth. How inadequate and expen- 


No Fixed Law in Conversion 183 


sive are all evangelistic efforts for the salvation of 
adults in later years! As compared with those saved 
in youth, how very few are saved in after years! 
The fewest become religious after becoming “‘settled 
in business,’ after marriage, or after entering the 
sacred precincts of motherhood! Becoming ab- 
sorbed in the cares of life, they suppose they have 
not time to attend to this life business. 


What Can We Teach Children? 


While there is much in religion which must wait 
for the fuller development of a greater capacity in 
the child, surely there is much of an elementary 
nature which can be and should be taught a child 
in his earlier years—such as obedience to parents, 
the love of God as our Heavenly Father, truthful- 
ness of life, sorrow for wrongdoing, thoughtfulness 
for others, religious liberality, and the need of Christ 
as our personal Friend and Saviour. All these 
our parents taught us, and all of them and more can 
be taught any intelligent child very early in life. 
These simple teachings are among the first principles 
of religion, and without them religion at any time 
of life would be a most incomplete affair. With 
such teachings as these instilled the child readily 
enough comes to understand his need of being re- 
ligious and from an instinctive tendency accepts 
Christ as his personal Saviour and is ‘‘born again”’ 
into the spiritual life. 

What experienced pastor has not found that as a 
rule the heart of the average child is wonderfully 
inclined to accept Christ as his personal Saviour 
and Friend? Ata very early date children can real- 


184 A Gospel for the New Age 


ize much of the nature of sin and religion and ap- 
preciate often more than their seniors the tenderness 
of the love of Christ and affirm their own love of him, 
and their life attachment attests their sincerity. 
Their feelings have been touched, their minds en- 
lightened, and their wills moved. They do not have 
to “turn and become as little children”’ to find their 
Saviour, for of such is the kingdom of heaven. They 
have not had the “experience” of an adult, and 
should not have, for are they not potential Chris- 
tians already without having to pass through the 
‘‘vale of tears” of their repenting seniors? 

Such is the sweet, simple religion of a responsive 
child at a time when hearts are tender and character 
is being formed. But this stage of life must pass and 
the age of self-conscious adolescence follow, when 
personal willing, which must determine the sub- 
sequent life, must emerge. It is this which seals 
and keeps the child a Christian after childhood’s 
days are gone. In the earlier stages the child was 
a cultural Christian, having been trained to love 
and trust Christ, as the child heart loves and trusts 
involuntarily; but now he has come to the direct 
surrender of himself ‘‘ of his own free will and accord,” 
which act completes and makes permanent the con- 
version of the child. Up to this crisis every line of 
religious culture should lead—to a cheerful, loving 
surrender of the entire self to Christ the Redeemer, 
which experience lies at the heart of all vital Chris- 
tianity, whether it be in child-life or in later years, 
How can there be real religion at any time of life 
without this loving, trustful surrender to the Lord 


No Fixed Law in Conversion 185 


and Master when personality is renewed and “‘new 
life’’ begins? 
An Easy Step for a Child 

It is often found that a well-prepared child can 
take this important step more readily than an 
adult. There is a secret assumption that such a 
thing as real religion is not possible to a child nor 
the knowledge of God as a Friend, when the real 
fact is, children are more capable of religion than 
many adults are. Did not the boy-child Samuel 
hear the voice of the Lord when Eli the aged prophet 
did not? Talk in a loving and tender manner to 
children about Christ and his love, tell them how 
close by he is in all their good thoughts, and they 
catch the meaning a great deal better than adults 
who have strayed into paths of sin. Children may 
not grasp the language of gospel experience as older 
persons will, but they can have the joyful conscious- 
ness of religion even better. They can make room 
for more gospel than their elders, and the highest 
and most spiritual things are instinctively close to 
them. Recently a class of young Christians was 
asked by their pastor to write out their answer to 
the question, “‘ What does it mean to be a Christian?” 
A girl of fifteen wrote: “It is to believe that the 
Saviour is able to save you, that he will forgive you; 
it is to love the Saviour and try to do his will.” 
Another of thirteen wrote: ‘‘It is to try to be good 
and do good and to love Jesus.” Another of the 
same age wrote: “To be a Christian is to love and 
serve the Lord, to try to do as much good as we can, 
and to live as near to him as we can.” A girl of 
fifteen answered: “‘To be a Christian is to love Jesus 


186 A Gospel for the New Age 


Christ with your whole heart and to yield your will 
to his completely.”’ One of thirteen gave this re- 
markable answer: ‘‘To be a Christian is to give one’s 
whole life to the will of God.”’ Children often under- 
stand much more about sin and religion than their 
parents give them credit for. 


Objections Not Valid | 


That so beautiful a something as the conversion 
of a child and his becoming a member of the Church 
should be objected to seems almost incredible. 
Yet such objections are often seriously urged. This 
grows out of a lack of knowledge of the child’s 
needs and the nature of religion. The one objection 
so often urged is that the child does not fully under- 
stand all that he is doing. In this the objector is 
most sincere. True, thechild cannot fully understand 
all that is implied in the step he takes; but who 
does? Can we apply this rule to all of life? Are 
there not many steps which a child must take with- 
out knowing why? Yet his very life depends upon 
his taking the step. How much do we all need to 
understand of the mysteries of life to live? Who has 
seen to the depth of all his problems? After all, 
is religion not a matter of faith rather than knowl- 
edge, and do we not all have to trust God rather than 
understand him? Shall we keep the child back till 
he may understand all about his own strange na- 
ture, all the mysteries of religion, and the depths of 
the love of God? That would be to close the door 
of salvation against him forever. How beautifully 
and clearly a child can comply with Christ’s great 


No Fixed Law in Conversion 187 


law of love to him, the highest law of the kingdom 
of heaven! 
They May Go Back 


It is often urged against the conversion of children 
and their becoming members of the Church that 
they may not continue faithful. A little girl said 
to her pastor: “‘ Why, if I join the Church, I may go 
back’’—evidently voicing the sentiment of her 
seniors. “Yes,” said the pastor, ‘“‘and if you do not 
join the Church you may go back. The Church is 
to help to keep you from going back.”’ Do all adults 
continue faithful? How is it with them as compared 
with children? A pastor held a revival exclusively 
for children in one of our best American cities. 
Fifty-eight came into the Church. Thirty years 
later, fifty-three were found to be faithful still. 
One had died, two had gone back to the world, 
while two had drifted elsewhere.! In a congrega- 
tion of eight thousand the count was made, and 
in all that throng only one had joined the Church 
after sixty years of age, three had joined after fifty, 
fifty after forty, two hundred after thirty, five hun- 
dred after twenty years of age, while all the rest— 
seven thousand or more—had become Christians 
in childhood or the days of adolescence!—and this 
in an audience of mature adults, not children. 
Could there be stronger argument for the work of 
grace in the heart of a child? The same test has 
often been made with like results as to the fidelity 
of childhood conversion. The large percentage 
of the vast army of those who love their Savior 
are faithful to him, and are giving their lives to his 


1G. G. Smith, ‘“‘Childhood and Conversion.” 


188 A Gospel for the New Age 


cause, who make the Church a progressive power for 
good in the world and are happy in doing so, did 
in early life give themselves to their Lord and have 
ever since followed in his footsteps with gladness. 
In the simplicity of their trustful natures they gave 
their young lives to him to be kept from evil and 
to live for God. Thus they did not form sinful 
habits to haunt them all their days. The experience 
of committing the soul to Christ made religion a 
personal affair, a deep and a real something. This 
is what we mean by childhood conversion. Is this 
not to use language in a true Scriptural sense, for 
does not this experience break up the trend of the 
old sinful order, establish a new and God-loving 
one, and put the young life in right relations with 
God? There is ample evidence in the Scriptures 
and in practical life to show that God intended the 
religious life to begin early in life. “As the twig is 
bent, the tree’s inclined.” The plastic young life 
awaits the molding touch of the hand of God, and 
every argument tends to the logical conclusion that 
an early conversion is in keeping with God’s plan 
in the religious life. That the kingdom of heaven 
is not nearer to its world-wide completion and so 
many are spending their lives under the dominance 
of sin is due no doubt to the lack of a right under- 
standing of the application of the gospel to child 
life and a more vigorous and Christlike application 
of the gospel to children. Surely the kingdom of 
heaven has not a more profitable and delightful 
task than the work among children. 


No Fixed Law in Conversion 189 


2. INSTANTANEOUS ADULT CONVERSION 


Youth is recognized as the logical time for the 
Christian life to begin, and if the work of the Church 
were ideally accomplished there would never be an 
occasion for conversion later in life. But we know 
that such is far from the accomplished fact, and sadly 
too many come to mature life in sin. The gospel is 
for all of every age and station in life. It would 
be un-Christlike, because of parental neglect or 
some other misfortune in early life, to deprive a soul 
of the chance of salvation. How many there are 
who, if saved at all, must be saved in mature life! 
To them the gospel message comes with convincing 
power; they are convicted of sin; they believe on the 
Lord Jesus Christ and are saved—at times in a 
moment. Now, with such people and those who all 
their life have been accustomed to witnessing spec- 
tacular conversion it is very difficult to believe any- 
thing but that their way of being saved is the ideal 
way or that a soul could be otherwise really con- 
verted. Yet this is but one method of conversion. 

Let instantaneous conversion be mentioned and 
the mind at once goes back to some great revival 
occasion with ample evangelistic machinery, ex- 
citement, and great sensation—none of which is an 
essential to salvation or should be associated with 
so sacred a something as the conversion of a soul. 
The manifestation of divine power is not limited to 
such material conditions. That so momentous a 
fact as the conversion of a soul does produce some 
excitement is to be expected. Such has been the 
case since the days of the apostles. But let it not be 
thought that this is the only way a soul can be saved. 


190 A Gospel for the New Age 


Great revival methods have their worth and also 
their dangers. For fear such a thought might be- 
come established and the power of God limited to 
such routine, many are coming to discourage the 
great revival and the spectacular conversion. If 
such were established, what force would be lost to 
the world! 

The instantaneous conversion is a definite fact of 
history dating back to “‘when the day of Pentecost 
was fully come.’’ Nor have its wonders ever ceased. 
The stories of such conversions constitute some of 
the most thrilling chapters of religious history and 
often mark the outposts of the conquest of the Cross. 
Under the earnest appeals of zealous Christian work- 
ers thousands have been awakened to trust God 
and have stepped into the kingdom of God in a mo- 
ment to become faithful, lifelong Christians. 

The experience of such conversions is by no means 
confined to revival occasions or a place of worship. 
Men like Savonarola?, John Calvin,? and Martin 
Luther have told how, like St. Paul, they came mo- 
mentarily to change their way of religious thinking. 
Thomas Carlyle, in “Sartor Resartus,’’* records his 
own striking religious experience, of which he after- 
wards said: “‘I there and then took the Devil by the 
throat. I remember it well and could go to the spot. 

There rushed over me a stream. as of fire. 
I shook black fear from me forever. I was strong, 
of unknown strength. . . . I there and then 
began to be a man.” Afterwards in a letter to a 


2“ Reformation,” Lindsey, p, 97. (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 
3“‘Life,”’ Villari, Chapter I. (Charles Scribner’s Sons.) 
4Book II, Chapter VII. 


No Fixed Law in Conversion 191 


friend he said: “From that time I date my ‘new 
birth.” Blame not the word (conversion), rather 
rejoice that such a word, signifying such a thing, 
has come to light in our Modern Era, although 
long hidden from the wisest ancients. The old 
world knew nothing of conversion. It was a new- 
attained progress in the moral development of man; 
hereby has the Highest come home to the bosoms 
of the most limited. What to Plato was but a hal- 
lucination and to Socrates a chimera is now clear 
and certain to your Zinzendorfs and your Wesleys 
and the poorest of your Pietists and your Method- 
ists.” When it is remembered how little attention 
has been given to our Lord’s teachings concerning 
this great doctrine, is there any wonder that the 
progress of the kingdom of heaven lagged and re- 
ligion lost its power? 

Not until the rise of modern evangelism was con- 
version considered really an essential to salvation, 
and in the matter of religion the subject was largely 
overlooked. While traveling for his health in France 
and Switzerland, John Fletcher found great crowds 
assemble nightly for the discussion of topics of re- 
ligious importance. On one occasion he inquired of 
the pastor if he ever had any conversions on such 
occasions. The pastor looked puzzled, and, on being 
informed what was meant, said: “We do not live in 
the age of miracles.” Yet this same kind of “mir- 
acle’” was a common occurrence in Mr. Fletcher’s 
Madely congregation in England (1785) and was 
stirring the English-speaking people to their depths 

5‘‘Life,’’ by Froude, Chapter VII. (Charles Scribner’s Sons.) 

6“*Sartor Resartus,’’ Book II, Chapter X. 


192 A Gospel for the New Age 


on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. If conversion 
be classed as a miracle, then the age of miracles had 
but begun; for under the preaching of such men as 
George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, and others 
such wonders were of daily occurrence in various 
lands. But prior to that age personal religion 
was not stressed, the sacramental feature of religion 
was depended upon, and the knowledge of sins for- 
given was a fact largely neglected. It is a paradox 
of religious history that the author of the greatest 
book of the eighteenth century written in defense of 
revealed religion, Joseph Butler, came to the dying 
bed without a sense of his acceptance with God. 
Calling his chaplain to his bedside, he said: “Though 
I have endeavored to avoid sin and to please God to 
the utmost of my ability, yet, from a consciousness 
of perpetual infirmities, I am still afraid to die.” 
“‘My lord,” said the chaplain, ‘“‘have you forgotten 
that Jesus is a Saviour?” ‘True,’ was the answer; 
“but how may I know that he is my Saviour?” 
“My lord, it is written, ‘He that cometh unto me 
I will in no wise cast out.’”’ *‘ True,” said the bishop; 
“‘and though I have read the Scriptures a thousand 
times, I have never felt its virtue till this moment; 
and now I die happy.’” That was in the year 1752, 
and about the same time Whitefield was swinging 
up and down the Atlantic seaboard in America, 
creating a great sensation by his wonderful sermons, 
in which the main features were conversion and a 
sense of acceptance with God. This gospel was 
preached to the frontiersmen, who received it gladly 
as the gift of God. 


7** Life,” Mangus, p. xii. (Religious Tract Society, London.) 





No Fixed Law in Converson. 193 


A light is thrown on the religious condition of those 
times by the fact that Gilbert Tennent created con- 
siderable excitement by preaching and printing 
his “Nottingham Sermon” on the “Danger of an 
Unconverted Ministry.’’® Tennent was one of Mr. 
Whitefield’s followers, and delivered his great ser- 
mon before the Synod of Philadelphia in 1740, 
which shows the prevalent neglect of the ministry 
to know and declare the greatest of the doctrines of 
Christianity as taught by Christ himself. 

Of the distressing religious conditions in England 
of those times, Warburton wrote: “I have lived to 
see the fatal crisis when religion has lost its vital 
hold upon the minds of the people.” Mr. Wesley 
spoke of the Church of those times as ‘‘having the 
form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.” 
In 1736 Bishop Joseph Butler wrote: “It has come, 
I know not how, to be taken for granted that Chris- 
tianity is no longer so much as a subject of inquiry, 
and that it is at length discovered to be fictitious, 
and nothing remains but to set it up as a principal 
subject of ridicule, by way of reprisal for having so 
long interrupted the pleasures of the world.’® In 
certain centers of thought all this doubtless was true, 
but how little did these great thinkers realize what 
God was doing beyond the radius of their soul 
dearth! At that particular time the Spirit of God 
was stirring beneath the surface like the sputterings 
of a mighty volcano ready to burst forth in world- 
redeeming power. In the same year, 1736, the “ Holy 


8*American Christianity,’”’ Bacon, p. 167. (Charles Scrib- 
ner’s Sons.) 

9‘ Life,” Mangus, p. ix. (Religious Tract Society, London.) 
13 


194 A Gospel for the New Age 


Club”’ was organized among the students at Oxford, 
which resulted in the ‘‘United Societies,” which 
have encircled the globe and swept millions into the 
kingdom of heaven on the waves of vital godliness. 

That religion of which Warburton spoke as “hav- 
ing lost its vital hold upon the minds of the people” 
was a religion without conversion, without holy 
living, and without the sense of the divine presence. 
Without these, what religion can live in the world at 
any time? The men who saved the day in those dark 
days did so by appealing not to men’s intellects, but 
to their hearts. It was the declaration of a gospel 
of new life that fired evangelism and sent the gospel 
of Christ ringing down the centuries as the salvation 
of mankind and the hope of the world. For well- 
nigh a century and a half it has dominated the North 
American Continent, if not indeed the English- 
speaking world. Nor has it lost its power in these 
later times, as can be testified to by millions of souls 
all around the earth. 

The last fifty years have been made quite distine- 
tive by the great revival waves which have charac- 
terized it. ‘“‘Not often has the world witnessed,” 
said Dr. Dale, “‘such a transformation in so short a 
while as came over England and Scotland on the 
visit of Mr. Moody and Mr. Sankey in 1875 and 1876, 
by which, declares Dr. George Adam Smith, ‘our 
people were stirred as they have not been since the 
days of Whitefield and Wesley.’”’ The sainted Dr. 
Dale, of Birmingham, was less likely to be swept off 
his feet by the great wave, so we shall let him tell 
the wonderful story: ‘‘I had seen occasional instances 
before of instant transition from religious anxiety 


No Fixed Law in Conversion 195 


to the clear and triumphant consciousness of restora- 
tion to God; but what struck me in the gallery of 
Bingly Hall was the fact that this instant transition 
took place with nearly every person with whom I 
talked. They came up into the inquiry room anxious, 
restless, feeling after God in the darkness; and when, 
after a few moments of conversation, they went 
away their faces were filled with light, and they left 
me not only at peace with God, but filled with joy.’ 

Such scenes, while not so extensive, have been 
experienced in America, in Wales, and more recently 
in China and Korea. These great revival waves, 
the atmosphere of sudden conversions, are in their 
very nature transitory and supernormal as an ex- 
perience. The one thing of importance is that which 
is of permanent value in its results, that which re- 
mains after the revivals are gone. That many do 
lose the effect of the great revival and bring conver- 
sion into disrespect is sadly too true, giving occasion 
for those little jibes such as Matthew Arnold in- 
dulged in at the expense of the Cornish revivals in 
England, when he said: *‘ They will have no difficulty 
in tasting, seeing, hearing, and feeling God twenty 
times every night, and be none the better for it to- 
morrow.” Yet this same Cornish miner’s faith had 
made him a new man, the secret of which was de- 
veloped by a traveler, Mr. Augustine Birrell, who 
said to one of the Cornish miners: ‘‘ You seem to be 
a very temperate people here; how did it happen?” 
The miner replied, lifting his cap solemnly: ‘‘ There 
came a man amongst us once; his name was John 





WThe Congregationalist, March, 1875. 


196 A Gospel for the New Age 


Wesley.” The revival and conversion had made that 
a new country. 

The fact to be considered is not how many lose 
the effect of conversion. ‘‘Men lapse from every 
level; we need no statistics to tell us that.” To fall 
is man’s misfortune, and due to his natural weakness. 
We should consider the heights to which he is raised, 
and what would be his condition had he never been 
lifted up by divine grace. Though the percentage 
of breakdowns was much larger than it is, we should 
be without excuse for dismissing the subject of con- 
version with a smile. It is the uplift rather than the 
breakdown that is of significance, for in this we get 
the true measure of the divine force at work in 
human life for its redemption. Out of the great re- 
vivals have come millions of Christianity’s very 
best recruits and strongest defenders. The experi- 
ence of conversion has been testified to by countless 
throngs of civilized men and women in all ages of 
the Christian era. Nor has the marvelous work of 
grace ceased. The experience which is writ large in 
the New Testament and in the lives of sixty genera- 
tions is still being repeated in our midst. ‘Our 
witnesses are not of yesterday, but of to-day. 
Our data are not fossils from the past, but are facts 
of the present, warm, fresh, and living.” ‘This is 
the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.” 

Instantaneous conversion is a fact of religious 
history; and what is more sacred than a fact which 
has to do with the soul’s welfare? The sacredness 
of any fact is perhaps the supreme lesson which 
science has impressed upon the present generation, 
and at last even science is beginning to learn its 


No Fixed Law in Conversion 197 


own lesson and to recognize that religion also has 
its facts, and that the thrilling consciousness of God’s 
immediate forgiveness and fellowship with Christ 
are facts which thrust themselves upon us and com- 
mand attention. 

That so great a work of grace should meet witn 
opposition or be discredited would seem incredible, 
if it were not a recognized fact. There are those 
who do not believe in sudden conversion, but think 
this altogether a hallucination and made up of 
animal excitement, leading only to evil. But these 
are ex-parte testimonials which speak without actual 
knowledge or experience of religion. ‘‘Let a man 
get converted and he will need no further proof, or 
he will have the only kind of explanation that is 
worth considering.”’ When one falls back on his 
spiritual consciousness and says, “‘Whereas I was 
blind, now I see,” argument is powerless to dislodge 
him. He has the witness in himself. 


3. THE GRADUAL CONVERSION 


While the facts of instantaneous conversion are 
abundant and beyond dispute, equally strong is the 
evidence for gradual conversion. Even though it is 
a fact that most of the first) Christains were brought 
to Christ by sudden conversion, this is by no means 
to be taken as the “Scriptural method”’ of becoming 
a Christian. It is rather unfortunate that the con-~ 
version of St. Paul has been taken as an ideal one. 
That was strictly in keeping with the character and 
history of the man, and has been duplicated on rare 
occasions. Many a soul has been disappointed in 
not experiencing a ‘“‘ Pauline conversion.”” While the 


198 A Gospel for the New Age 


Bible gives the account of many blessed conversions 
that were not ‘Pauline,’ these have been over- 
looked; yet we dare not discredit their genuineness. 
They too were Biblical and led to ideal religious 
living. 

The character of a conversion depends largely 
upon the circumstances—the presentation or the 
temperament of the convert. The history of almost 
any local church would show that nearly all of its 
early members became Christians through sudden 
conversion; yet this was due to the novelty of evan- 
gelism which but recently gave them the gospel 
message, and to the earnest and impassionate ap- 
peal which brought them to the serious considera- 
tion of religion, Then the matter of temperament 
enters largely into our religious experience. By 
no means are all men highly emotional or easily 
moved by direct religious appeal. Nor can the 
spectacular eonversion lay claim to the exclusive 
manifestation of the power of God to save souls. 
As the work of evangelical Christianity has become 
better established, the Bible better understood, and 
the laws of human personality better recognized, 
men have come to trust their own calmer reason 
rather than their emotions in matters of religion. 
Furthermore, thinking people have come to realize 
that while religion is wrapped in a halo of mystery 
it is in its methods a reasonable something. The 
gospel of redemption has been reduced more nearly 
to scientific expression; and as we have learned 
what repentance, faith, and redemption mean, we 
have come to remember that while God may awaken 
a sleeper by a vivid flash of lightning, he awakens 


No Fixed Law tn Conversion 199 


all the earth’s vital forces by a steady glow of sun- 
light. The God who in Elijah’s day was not in the 
storm or the whirlwind, but in “the still small voice,” 
is to-day at work everywhere in the same quiet 
manner, hence the deep, still workings of the Holy 
Spirit always. 

The great awakenings and stirring religious oc- 
casions which have figured so prominently in our 
religious history in modern times were, in a measure, 
a necessity. Many of the Church constituency 
were pioneers who bravely took their families to the 
frontier in forest and plain. These were from pious 
homes, and were themselves of strong religious ten- 
dencies. They with their families gladly welcomed 
the great revival as their only public means of grace. 
Then preachers and religious teachers were few and 
churches not yet built. The home training of youths 
was neglected, and men and women grew up without 
religion; however, they were not skeptics, but brave- 
hearted, unconverted men and women with strong 
religious instincts who greeted gladly any occasion 
to come together in a community way. But these 
same epoch-making revivals were necessarily transi- 
tory. The demands disappeared, and they died out. 
But while they lasted the “old-time revivals’’ were 
wonderful instruments in the hands of God in ar- 
resting the unsaved, melting down the hardest sinner, 
and converting the most obstinate soul. But, in 
their very origin and method, did they not argue the 
neglect of the essential work of Christianity, and 
would not their continuance have been to encourage 
and prolong that same neglect? In place of fully 
nurturing souls for Christ, undue dependence was 


200 A Gospel for the New Age 


put in the “revival meeting”’ to get men saved and 
to build up the kingdom of heaven. Then, too often, 
the joy of service was forgotten in the rapture of 
the rich religious experience. In the circle of im- 
mediate rejoicing the great far-off unsaved world 
was overlooked. 

It must be admitted that the ‘old-time revival 
shout”’ was as fine an ecstasy as ever swept a proph- 
et’s soul. Its like has not been known apart from 
a religious realization of the divine soul filling. 
Yet it was egoistie; it had to do too much with the 
individual soul, and not enough with the great 
outer world for which Christ died; and after the work 
meant to be accomplished was done, that type of 
religious manifestation passed, as it was destined to 
do. It is a fact of history that religious ecstasy has 
grown less as civilization and culture have advanced. 
It was so in the days of the prophets, in the middle 
ages, and in the more recent past. We may expect 
the same to happen with us. The moving of the 
Spirit in powerful and instantaneous salvation seems 
to have claimed an age and workers all its own. Of 
this and its results Thomas Chalmers had the fol- 
lowing to say: ‘‘When we look at the greatness of 
the achievement wrought by men who had just 
emerged from grossest barbarism; when we think of 
the change they wrought in materials so crude and 
uncompromising; when we see how they have re- 
lieved the grim solitude of the desert, and witness the 
love and listen to the piety of reclaimed savages— 
who would not long to be in possession of the charm 
by which they have wrought the wonderful trans- 


No Fixed Law in Conversion 201 


formations? Who would not exchange for it all the 
paraphernalia of polished eloquence?” 

As the laws of gospel propagation have come to 
be better understood and put into practice, and the 
value of a quiet conversion to be appreciated, men 
are coming more and more to surrender themselves 
to Christ in the moments of quiet deliberation. 
After this fashion large numbers are coming into 
the Church in all countries. They may not have so 
thrilling an’ experience, and outwardly may not 
seem to rejoice as much as did the participants in the 
“old-time religion,’”’ but who will say that their 
quiet joy is not deeper in its channel, of a steadier 
flow, and their fidelity to the Lord not of the firmer 
and more abiding type? 

While the ability to name the occasion and the 
very hour of conversion has been a source of great 
comfort to many and a refuge in an hour of doubt— 
and the lack of this special privilege a grief to others, 
as if they had missed something out of their experi- 
ence—yet not even this is an essential in religion. 
Not the manner but the fact of conversion is the 
needful something. No one-way rule can be laid 
down for all the world. To demand conversion 
after a manner not possible to some would be to 
shut them out of the kingdom of God. Some of the 
most triumphant Christians and most successful 
workers in saving souls have not been able to tell 
when they became Christians. They know that they 
are the children of God, and that is enough. Not 
even the great Jonathan Edwards could remember 
the day when he did not love God as his Heavenly 
Father. Thus it has been with many who have gone 


202 A Gospel for the New Age 


on trusting God, gladly rendering him a life service 
of love. They have never felt the need of anything 
besides the vital allegiance of themselves to God and 
a whole-hearted enlistment in his services. From 
this has come a sweet sense of peace, indicating a 
vital soul harmony with God, which is redemption 
and real religion. While such persons may not be 
able to tell the golden moment when such a life began 
any more than they could tell just when the dawn 
began, they know that they walk in the full glow of a 
beautiful day, satisfied and saved, “all canopied 
with light.’”’ They have received “‘life from above” 
which makes their religion dynamic and a precious 
reality. 

Yet is it not a fact that many of God’s redeemed 
children have never known this great and high ex- 
perience? They have an equal right with others to 
the Tree of Life whose fruits are their heritage, but 
still they grope and lag, and are religiously defeated 
and deprived of that which is theirs. May we not 
discover the secret of this defeat, and be ourselves 
benefited by the discovery? Our next chapter will 
serve us as a light tower to guide to fairer seas. 


CHAPTER X 


THE SUPERNATURAL IN OUR RELIGION 


“‘No other miracle,” says Fitchett, ‘‘is equal to that which 
changes the human soul, as the apostles themselves were 
visibly transfigured men. The cowards who had forsaken 
their Master, fleeing for their lives and surrendering him to 
the Cross, are now lifted up to a mood which shrinks from no 
peril, which has in it a note of triumphant victory. 

“Their spokesman is the man who has thrice denied his 
Master, when he had fallen into the hands of the enemy, and 
he now frames against his countrymen the most terrific of all 
indictments: ‘By wicked hands they have crucified and slain 
God’s messenger, the hope of the race. . . . Let all the 
house of Israel know assuredly that God hath made this Jesus 
whom you have crucified both Lord and Master’—words of 
a sermon which has stood the test for two thousand years.” 
—‘‘Where Higher Criticism Fails,” Fitchett (Methodist Book 
Concern). 


CHAPTER X 
THE SUPERNATURAL IN OUR RELIGION 


THE relentless strife between ‘‘science and reli- 
gion”’ is due not so much to the lack of agreement 
on material facts (for in this realm there is little dis- 
sension), but the issue between them is this: Shall 
the presence of God be recognized in the government of 
the world and the experience of men? For the last 
fifty years in scientific circles there had been an ad- 
mitted cleavage of thought just here. In his Presi- 
dential Address, in 1877, Mr. Tyndall, in discussing 
“Science and Man,” said: ‘‘There is on every hand 
a growing repugnance to invoking the supernatural 
in accounting for the phenomena of human life; 
and the thoughtful minds just referred to [the scien- 
tists], finding no trace of evidence in favor of any 
other origin, are driven to seek in the interaction of 
social forces the genesis and development of man’s 
moral nature.”! At the present day the origin of 
the human soul is sought in the same “interaction 
of social forces.” 

Now, it must be admitted that Mr. Tyndall is 
the apostle of modern science. Rarely do we find 
a “scientist”? who does not walk in his footsteps; 
and in all the wonders of scientific work there is a 
decided Tyndall glow. Take, for example, his theory 
of the origin of the universe: “I hold the nebular 
theory as it was held by Kant, Laplace, and Herschel, 


1‘ Fragments of Science,” p.625. (D. Appleton Co.) 
(205) 


206 A Gospel for the New Age 


and as it is held by the best scientific intellects of 
to-day. According to that theory, our sun and 
planets were once diffused throughout space as an 
impalpable haze, out of which, by condensation, 
came the solar system. What caused the haze to 
condense? Loss of heat. What rounded the sun 
and planets? That which rounds a tear—molecular 
foree. . . . Was life implicated in the nebula, 
a part of it; or was it of a vaster and wholly Un- 
fathomable Life? Or was it the work of a Being, 
standing outside of the nebula, who fashioned it, 
but whose own origin and ways are past finding out?” 
“As far as the eye of science has hitherto ranged 
through nature, no intrusion of purely creative power 
into any phenomena has ever been observed. 
Such an intrusion is opposed to the spirit of science. 2 
Beyond this science has not gone even to our day. 

Here we have the whole story in a word. Along 
these lines ‘‘modern science,” with all its literature 
on the evolutionary theory of the origin and perfec- 
tion of life, has been evolved. ‘Strip it naked,” 
says Tyndall, “‘and you stand face to face with the 
notion that in that nebula were not only more ig- 
noble forms of molecular and animal life, but the 
more wonderful mechanism of the human body— 
emotions, intellect, will, and all their phenomena— 
were latent in that fiery cloud. . . . All our 
philosophy, all our poetry, all our science, and all our 
arts—Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, and Raphael— 
are potential in the fires of the sun.’’8 

Now, what was it that the “defenders of the faith” 


«« Fragments of Science,’’ p. 500, 6th ed. (D. Appleton Co.) 
Tbid., p. 440. 


The Supernatural in Our Religion 207 


sai, and still see, in this wonderful dream to cause 
them to enter such a storm of protest and keep the 
battle raging? They plainly saw the reappearing 
of two old foes of the faith, Pantheism and Fatalism, 
dressed up in scientific garb, which “shut God out 
of the world.” “Science” conceives of the universe 
in the beginning as a vast machine thought out, 
adjusted, and so charged with energy as to need only 
a start to continue evolving from nebulous embryo 
all God’s infinite designs, including all we know to- 
day—all myriad forms of life, even to the intellect 
and immortal soul of man. 

Of this materialistic, fixed conception of God’s 
way with the world—a mere guess—the Christian 
philosophers have rightly been extremely shy. They 
have felt (1) that it put God at too great a distance 
from the world—a billion or two years in point of 
time; (2) it deprived the human race of its cherished 
glory—namely, man’s prerogative of shaping his 
own destiny; (8) it cuts man out of soul fellowship 
with his Maker. Yet in these very facts lie the source 
and secret of all moral and religious life; and any 
theory of the universe which ignores these is mani- 
festly false to God and toman. And our predecessors 
were wise in their foreboding, as has been shown by 
the life and character of many eminent evolution- 
ists. 

There have been in this school many eminently 
pious and good men, such as Henry Drummond, 
John Fiske, Rudolf Eucken, and others. This we all 
readily admit; but what are the broad facts in the 
religious history of modern scientists? Is not the 
general trend of materialistic science away from, 


208 A Gospel for the New Age 


and not toward, the recognition of the supremacy 
of a personal God in nature, especially in human 
affairs? Do we not find certain scientists saying, 
“We find no use for God”’? Was not Thomas Hux- 
ley himself accused of being religiously ‘‘as cold as 
an iceberg’? Did not Mr. Darwin, who was “‘in- 
tended for the Church,”’ become dry in soul and lose 
all spiritual emotions? Is not the set of the scientific 
sail in the direction of agnosticasm, whose platform 
is, ‘‘If there is a God, I do not know him, and there is 
no means by which I can find him out.” This phi- 
losophy in Germany produced such men as Schopen- 
hauer and his atheistic pupil Von Neitzsche, the 
Darwin of the Teutons and apostle of the teachings 
which produced the atmosphere in which were forged 
the weapons of the most cruel war that ever cursed 
the earth. The religious character of such men is 
known to all the world. 


THE ANTICHRIST SPIRIT 


If the influence of such ‘‘science”’ is not pernicious 
and detrimental to vital godliness, why is it that so 
many of that school are, if not bitter enemies, 
thoroughly indifferent to the things of Christ, 
rarely speak respectfully of our Lord, and want to 
“break the bondage of consecrated obligations’? 4 
Why isit that sixty per cent of the university teachers 
of America—our boasted Christian land—class them- 
selves as either atheists, agnostics, or indifferent to 
the idea of personal immortality? Have they not 
been ‘“‘scientifically”’ trained? 


4‘ Mind in the Making,” James Harvey Robison. (Harper 
Bros.) | 


The Supernatural in Our Religion 209 


The trouble with this entire school, both in science 
and religion, sifts itself down to a disbelief in the 
immediate Divine oversight in nature or the con- 
sciousness of God’s presence in the soul in religion. 
They reason thus: If God started the ‘ evolving” 
infinite ages ago, in an unerring process which has 
not and cannot fail to do his will, where is the further 
need of his presence? This force is still at work in 
our religion, as everywhere else, pushing us on to 
some far-off zon or state of perfection. This is suf- 
ficient; why ask for more? Why the need for God 
at the beginning of our religious experience—re- 
generation—or at any other stage of our religious 
life-struggle? The impersonal force inherent in 
the soul, says the scientist, is sufficient for this 
great work; why call in a mysterious Force to aid in 
what man can do of himself? “Religion is, indeed, 
our own affair,’’® says Harvard’s professor of phi- 
losophy, as contrasted with the idea of religious in- 
sight being a revelation. 

Here is the source of all our godless, man-made 
religion, the bane of the age and cause of much 
religious defeat. In any age the tendency of this 
impersonal-God idea always has been to chill the 
lifeblood of religion and lead men into grievous 
errors. 

ELIMINATING THE DIVINE 

It is amazing to what extent our American Chris- 
tianity is cast into the mold of the human-sufficiency 
religion. Its tenets are something like these: Man 
is naturally not a very bad creature, is not depraved 


5“Source of Religious Insight,’’ Royce, p. 32. (Charles 
Scribner’s Sons.) 


14 


210 A Gospel for the New Age 


_ “with a tendency to evil as the sparks to fly upward”; 

children do not need redemption through Christ, 
but they need only good environment and Chris- 
tian nurture to grow into saints eventually; prayer 
is only for the morale of him who prays, and not to 
bring God’s power into play in human life; revivals 
are purely human institutions, projected by human 
ingenuity and accomplished by human skill; salva- 
tion is living the successful life, and not a matter of 
soul redemption; the holy life is achieved purely by 
human persistence and will, not by God’s help. 
Man works out his own salvation; there is no God 
working within him to will and to do of God’s good 
pleasure. Whatever man is, he is wholly “‘self- 
made.”’ 

All this is Unitarianism—modern Socinianism— 
pure and simple, which repudiates the blood of 
Christ, ‘‘shed for many for the remission of sins,” 
which denies the Virgin Birth and divinity of our 
Lord, except as all men have a dash of the divine in 
them. This same cult would eliminate all miracles 
from the life of Christ even to his bodily resurrection, 
as Thomas Jefferson cut them all out of his Latin- 
Greek-French-English New Testament, leaving only 
what he called the “ Morals of Jesus.’’ This Antichrist 
creeps into prominence on all occasions, in university 
lectures, in pretentious volumes given as premiums 
for subscriptions to periodicals. It slips into our 
orthodox Reviews under the guise of a review of the 
Life of Emerson. But worst of all, it gets nation- 
wide publicity by some religious ‘‘wanderer”’ posing 
as a martyr to freedom of speech as against the 
tyranny of orthodoxy. 


The Supernatural in Our Religion 211 


A SENSE OF LONENESS 


One reads such literature and hears such speeches 
with a shudder of loneliness. Left to himself, with 
no polarity of soul for God, no proffer of divine grace, 
no guidance of the Holy Spirit, one is terrified by a 
relentless heart hunger and feels as if lost in vastness 
with no beckoning hand to guide to safety. This 
chilling sense steals over his soul and defeats his 
every effort. If he be a preacher, he is not called of 
God to the great work, but only “decided to abandon 
the law for the ministry.”’ What enthusiasm has he 
in any enterprise beyond individual success? It is 
all human at best, originated in the intellect of man 
and projected by human skill. 

Yet this is the philosophy that is invading the 
kingdom of heaven to-day; this is the armor-clad 
foe with all the prestige of “science,” that would 
shut God out from his own and leave man to grope 
in spiritual night. 

“Science only discovers God’s method of doing his 
work and thereby manifesting himself,’ says one. 
“‘Some souls are greatly blessed by this way of con- 
ceiving of God. Some ‘modernists’ are deeply pious 
and evangelical. They love God and want to do his 
will.” 

But before this philosophy shall become satisfac- 
tory to the religious mind it must get beyond the 
conception of God as an absent deity working by 
fixed, fatalistic laws, impliet in the scientific theory 
of world construction, and its corollary, “‘the sur- 
vival of the fittest,” that cruelist of all theories of 
life. Then it must bring man a spiritual Father- 
God, imminent in nature and identifying himself in 


212 A Gospel for the New Age 


all the sequences of human life. Till this is done 
“science” stands at the judgment bar of humanity 
““weighed and found wanting.” “A tree is known 
by its fruits,” and observation has shown that pres- 
ent-day science does not contribute to personal 
piety. 

The fact might as well be admitted that the age is 
in the grasp of a power which does not make for 
godliness, and its Antichrist spirit is telling upon the 
times. Ours is quite a different world from that 
which our fathers bequeathed to us fifty years ago. 
Then the American continent had been under the 
dominance of evangelism for well-nigh a century. 
Christian character was at the summit of things, 
honor was first, marriage was secred, home ties 
were sweet, prayer was the power house of pro- 
ficiency, the Bible the foundation of civilization, and 
God was supreme. Then home was the citadel of 
the nation; but what have we now? 

It has been said that the publication of Darwin’s 
“Origin of Species by Natural Selection”? marked 
the beginning of a new era in the world’s thought. 
Why? Because it and the “Descent of Man,” by 
their very novelty, caught the popular ear and started 
a wave in the direction of an agnostic “science.” 
It has not established man’s kinship to the monkey; 
but by many the Bible is sneered at, religion has 
become godless, and Christianity has been embalmed 
and placed upon the shelf as a mummy of a discarded 
belief. And this to-day is the attitude of much that 
is labeled ‘“‘science’—nebulous and hypothetical 
in the extreme, as it may be. Mr. Tyndall said of 
Mr. Darwin, during his lifetime, that “‘he drew 


The Supernatural in Our Religion 213 


heavily upon the scientific tolerance of his age’’;* and 
Mr. Ladd, of Yale, said that ‘‘no reputable scientist 
would class himself as a Darwinite in science’’— 
and this when his theory was at the zenith of popular 
approval. And the same verdict is issued by the 
real scientists to-day. Yet this is the “science” 
which has captured the age and gets the applause 
while religion gets the hiss; and in the universities 
our young men are told: “If you find your science 
and religion in conflict, throw away your religion.” 
Such men are allowed to attack religion at will under 
the claims of ‘‘science’’; but let a preacher dare draw 
attention to the godlessness of science, and at once 
he is dubbed as of the “‘laity,’’ meaning the un- 
initiated, the uncouth, and the ignorant. 


THE ‘‘ PSYCHOLOGY”? OF RELIGION 


Religion suffers no little by getting into the hands 
of this class of ‘“‘scientifically’’ trained minds. 
They proceed upon the hypothesis that religion has 
no mystery; that, in keeping with all things under 
heaven, it too is subject to materialistic analysis. 
Men talk about the “rationale of conversion,” 
and want to set forth the “mode and tenses” of 
the great phenomenon. They want to explain the 
varied feature of religious experience by determining 
the “‘psychological idiosyncrasies” of the individual. 
But when all this has been accomplished, what have 
we gained? How much nearer are we to the depths 
of the mystery of God’s dealings with man? We 
may see the results of what has happened to man 
in the great work of regeneration, but who can tell 


6 Fragments of Science,” p. 437. (D. Appletcn Co.) 


214 A Gospel for the New Age 


whence the wind cometh or whither it goeth? 
‘‘So is every one that is born of the Spirit.” 

God has at no time alienated himself from the 
souls of men, or from any part of his creation. 
The great work of cleansing and fitting the soul for 
his indwelling is altogether his, and it is presump- 
tion for anyone to think it otherwise. Hence we 
must hold that a greater than human power is es- 
sential to the moral transformation of man, as well 
as to the victorious struggles of all subsequent re- 
ligious life. Here we meet with one of the inscruta- 
ble mysteries of God; the work is his by whatever 
way he may desire to accomplish his will. 


CHARLES G. FINNEY REVIEWED 


No one familiar with the character of Charles G. 
Finney, wonderful revivalist that he was, can doubt 
his sincerity; but we must question the correctness 
of his opinion when he says: ‘‘There is no miracle 
in a revival. There might be a miracle among the 
antecedent causes, or there might not. The apostles 
employed miracles simply as a means to arrest at- 
tention to their message and establish its Divine 
authority; but the miracle was not the revival or its 
origin.”” Now, the force of this statement depends 
entirely upon what is meant by “miracle.” If 
there is meant such abnormal phenomena as were 
witnessed by Saul of Tarsus on his way to Damascus, 
then Dr. Finney’s opinion may be accepted. But 
if he means that a revival is altogether a human 
work which may be accomplished by “‘claptrap 
machinery,” that souls may be “‘born again,” sin 
mightily uprooted, and character made anew with- 


The Supernatural in Our Religion 215 


out the aid of the divine intervention, then he is 
wrong. There has never yet been a genuine revival 
that was not the result of serious prayers, and those 
prayers have always been for the outpouring of the 
Holy Spirit, the manifestation of God’s soul-saving 
power. Wherever this Power is manifest and souls 
are saved, whether in a spectacular manner or other- 
wise, there a “miracle” has been performed, a work 
has been accomplished which God alone can do, 
and which he has never delegated to anyone else or 
to any sort of machinery whatever. This is in direct 
harmony with all Bible and Christian teaching. 
“Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, 
saith the Lord.” From the day of Pentecost till 
the present time there has never been a soul-stirring, 
far-reaching revival that did not stand in proof of 
this statement. Genuine conversion is of God. 
The recognition of this fact gave evangelism prestige 
and power everywhere and made conversion to be 
most real. Just this faith reinstated, this trusting in 
God to accomplish the soul transformation and give 
the victory, is what the world needs most in this age 
of the seeming disappearance of genuine conversion 
and dynamic religion. It would be wisdom to recog- 
nize this fact. To-day we have what men call “great 
meetings.” Vast crowds assemble and masterful 
sermons are preached. The music is inspiring and an 
interest is aroused. Souls give themselves to the 
cause of Christ in great numbers; and who dare say 
that they are not sincere? But the old-time power 
seems lacking. The agony for ‘‘power from above”’ 
is unknown, hence is not realized in great measure, 


216 A Gospel for the New Age 


Philosophize, analyze, and classify as we may, but 
the power zs of God. 

Professor James’s great book, ‘‘ Varieties of Re- 
ligious Experience,” holds a unique position in re- 
ligious literature. Dr. John Watson called it the 
‘“most scientific book on religious consciousness yet 
published.”” Yet George Jackson, in his Cole 
Lectures, points out the fact that “‘he does not deal 
with religious experience at all.”’ Says he: “A man 
may fill reams of paper discussing the emotional 
factors which combine to make possible the experi- 
ence of St. Paul on the Damascus road; but if he 
ignores the central fact of divine forgiveness and 
fellowship, which became the strength of the apostle’s 
life and the source of his activities, he has left out 
the only element to which a Christian would give 
the name of ‘religion’ at all. With all his cleverness, 
it must be confessed, this is exactly UY Professor 
James has done.’”? 


WHERE THE LIGHT FAILS 


May it not be possible to trace much of the im- 
potency of our present-day religion, of which so 
many complain, to this one source, of which Mr. 
James stands accused? Many men, by giving their 
attention to the “psychology” of religious experience 
and God’s ‘‘method” of dealing with the human 
soul, have missed the dynamics of it all. While 
trying to reduce religion to the level of scientific 
inquiry, they have not realized the mystery of godli- 
ness and have not found the secret of power. Men 


™Fact of Conversion,” pp. 187, 188. (Fleming H. Revell 
Co.) 


The Supernatural in Our Religion 217 


of materialistic training have been trying to reduce 
all life to the level of materialistic laws when religion 
belongs high above all such commonplace things. 
By the human intellect and mechanical means men 
have been trying to solve the problems of spiritual 
life, but have failed, and the world is feeling the 
awful effect of their failure. Can it be possible that 
we have not divined the secret of that failure? We 
cannot reduce to dead formula the deep workings of 
the Spirit. God will not be bound by such me- 
chanical rules. He deals with each individual soul 
according to the variations of that particular life; 
and his ways are past finding out. Our Saviour 
gave us a hint of this by his reference to the coming 
and going of the wind. By eliminating all the im- 
mediate workings of the Spirit and reducing religion 
to a scientific formula, forgetting the divine ele- 
ment, men may have the form of godliness, but not 
the power; and that means a religion without holy 
fire and enthusiasm, without the sublime daring of 
the cross. Such a soulless religion without Holy 
Ghost power and heroic daring is not the kind of 
religion Jesus bequeathed to a needy world, nor is 
it the kind of religion to redeem and uplift our 
troubled age. The records show that this ‘‘natural- 
ized’”’ religion has not made history by turning the 
world upside down. 


THE RELIGION WHICH SAVED ENGLAND 


If it be true, as Mr. Lecky says, that England was 
saved the horrors of French Revolution during the 
reign of George II by the religious revolution which 
a short while before was begun by the preaching of 


218 A Gospel for the New Age 


the evangelists, may we not ask how this was ac- 
complished? Surely not by appealing to the intellect 
of England or her patriotism. Her intellect was never 
finer. Those were the days of Hume and Boling- 
broke, of Addison and Johnson, Pitt and Burke, 
Newton and Clive. These were all stars of the first 
magnitude. Yet Mr. Wesley did not call upon them 
for an instant. Nay, he labored on often in the face 
of their scorn and discouragement. He and his 
army of “lay preachers” went into every corner of 
the kingdom proclaiming man’s fallen nature and 
need of regeneration, together with the infinite 
goodness and love of God, conversion and holy living. 
What followed is known to all the world. 

The hope of humanity then, as now, lies in the 
great statement of the Redeemer, “‘Ye must be born 
again,’’ must have new life from above. How else 
can we explain the fact that some of the greatest 
men in the world’s history have stepped suddenly 
out of a state of darkness, uncertainty, and sin into 
the realm of certainty, freedom, and gladness? 
Mr. Fitchett points out that Bishop Paley has built 
up on the conversion of St. Paul an almost match- 
less demonstration of the truths of Christianity 
itself, 

The moral transformation of a strong and pas- 
sionate soul, suddenly and permanently changed, 
is one of the most indisputable and remarkable facts 
of history. To transform a zealot at a breath into 
a saint, a persecutor of Christianity into an avowed 
apostle and martyr for the truths of Christianity— 
this is truly a miracle. An event so amazing must 


The Supernatural in Our Religion 219 


have behind it a producing power no less wonderful 
than the results achieved. 

A “definite experience” is the dividing line in the 
life of such men. On one side are to be found strug- 
gling, doubt, toiling, and failure; while on the other 
side are certainty, gladness, power, and achieve- 
ment. Something has happened in the supreme 
moment, and that something was their conversion, 
their coming into right relations to God, that exalted 
state held out to us in the gospel. This coming of 
the soul to its own in redemption is no doubt the 
answer to man’s soul-longing for freedom, life, 
dominion, and fellowship with the divine. ‘‘Fel- 
lowship, heirship, sonship—these are terms which 
abound in the New Testament,” says Bishop Lam- 
buth; ‘‘ but we have failed to catch the ring and meas- 
ure of their significance—enlarged life, divine heri- 
tage, noble companionship—a share as coworkers 
with God in his redemptive scheme. When a man’s 
nature undergoes redemption, his transformed soul 
is illumined and coupled with divine energy. It isa 
rediscovery of man’s destined sphere and a renewed 
emphasis of his work. He enters the workshop as a 
child; he goes out as a master workman, and he too 
becomes a world builder.’’’ 


PERMANENT RESULTS 


Besides this, what are some of the permanent 
benefits of the process of soul-renewal? (1) The liv- 
ing Christ is received as a personal Saviour, and the 
sublime ideals of redemption as they exist in the 


«Winning the World for Christ,” p.22. (Fleming H. Revell 
Co.) 


220 A Gospel for the New Age 


mind of God are fulfilled in human life. (2) The 
aroused moral nature receives renewed energy, and 
with an awakened will bounds forward in glad obedi- 
ence, (8) A new affection is begotten, so the good 
which was once hated is loved and the evil once 
enjoyed is abhorred. (4) Having heard the call of 
the true Leader, the soul issues a declaration of 
spiritual independence. The clear testimony is, 
“Whereas I was blind, now I see’”’; and while the 
soul’s struggles are not entirely past, the day of con- 
version is the day of religious emancipation and the 
beginning of a new era—a life thrilled with the as- 
surance of a final victory. (5) To the newborn soul 
the sky is radiant with hope, and he is a rightful 
optimist in all life’s issues, because the forces which 
make for triumph are his. This assurance becomes 
to him an “inward witness’’ and an increasing joy. 
Such a spiritual dynamic is the secret of progress 
in all true human development. It is God’s approach 
to redeemed human nature, by which he makes his 
grace available to needy mankind, filling the limited 
with the unlimited, so that the converted soul plus 
the power at his command is more than human. It 
has ever been the divine in the human which has 
made it truly heroic. Since the beginning of history 
this has been a recognized fact in religious annals. 
All well-poised souls have felt it and have given 
testimony to the fact. God is at work within, en- 
abling mankind ‘‘to will and to do of his good pleas- 
ure.’ While struggling alone the tide may be too 
much for man and may bear him down, till he reaches 
up and grasps the proffered hand. With this aid he 
rises above the tide, evil tendencies are overcome, 


The Supernatural in Our Religion 221 


and the seemingly impossible happens. Duties 
which once seemed irksome, if not beyond human 
attainment, not only become possible, but a real 
delight. 

Such a consciousness of life and power and love is 
ample to sustain one in all the mazes of this present 
life and land him safe in the paradise of God. Such 
a blessed frame of mind and communion with God 
make life real, having that complement of grace 
which saves to the uttermost and brings man to the 
completion of his being. This is the secret back of 
God’s revelation of himself in Christ Jesus and the 
gift of the Holy Spirit, as well as the explanation 
of the Cross as the symbol of redeeming love standing 
upon the hilltop of human history. This redeemed 
life, made pure and sweet and beautiful, is the path- 
way wherein shine the footprints of Him who said, 
““T am the way, the truth, and the life,”’ and in that 
path he calls us all to walk and live to the glory of 
God the Father. This is the full fruitage of God’s 
great plan in the management of the destiny of man 
—though greatly marred by the careless handling 
of his soul liberty—the gracious forgiveness of sin, 
the gift of eternal life through the riches of grace 
in Christ Jesus our Lord. 

The blessed benefits accruing from this ‘‘work of 
grace’’ in the soul of man and the divine fellowship 
attending it will be discussed in the next chapter, 
which beckons our approach by the topic, “God 
with Us: The Reality of the Divine Presence.” 
To the consideration of this matchless theme we 
hasten on, 


“A 
a. 


a A 


® 
\ 





CHAPTER XI 


GOD WITH US: THE REALITY OF THE DIVINE 
PRESENCE 


THE CHRISTIAN GOD 


Ours is not the God of materialistic science, hiding himself 
behind molecules of matter and manifesting himself only in 
electrons of force; but he is a God to whom his earthly chil- 
dren may lift up holy hands and cry for help, and whose pres- 
ence they may have with them all the time, and whose ever- 
lasting arms they feel upholding them. This is our Father- 
God. 





“‘T have seen solitude, but never abandonment. However 
remote my path, there has always fared with me an unknown 
companion of unfailing goodness. He has been strong in the 
distress of life and patient and severe in the hour of careless- 
ness. ‘‘Neverhavel fought a battle that he was not at my side. 
Into all life we go together. We were two who spoke in public, 
two who took counsel by the fireside. I have come to know 
him as another self, a good genius, a near and superior Spirit 
who untangles the perplexities in the essentials of life. He 
has shown me joys in bright days, in darkness has cheered 
my path. Wandering perplexed in the labyrinth of ideas and 
passion, I would see him near, and his glance would open the 
way.’ —“ The Better Way,”’ Wagner (McClure, Phillips and Co). 


“The life of the Spirit,’’ says Mitchell, ‘“‘is a thirst for God. 
There is no other figure which so clearly presents that life as 
it must be to realize God. . . . Cold hearts never burn 
and never yearn. The promise is for men who must have God 
or die from desire of him.”—‘‘Elements of Personal Christi- 
anity” (Methodist Book Concern). 


CHAPTER XI 


GOD WITH US: THE REALITY OF THE 
DIVINE PRESENCE 


THE sense of the divine presence is an essential 
in religion, and should be sought not simply as a 
religious luxury or ambitious spiritual attainment, 
but as an experience of real religion. It is to the soul 
what health is to the body, a sign that all is well and 
the laws of religion are being obeyed. That God 
might thus come into conscious relation to man, 
and that man might be blessed with the divine 
indwelling, was the purpose of main’s creation and 
the gift of his religious nature. 

Man in his station is the explanation of creation. 
He is the keystone of creation’s arch, the completion 
of all, and that to which all else is contributory. 
Without man to interpret and to utilize, much of 
creation would remain a mystery. How explain, 
without him, the existence of minerals, of forests, 
and of precious gems? Without a hand to polish, 
what were the purpose of the flashing diamond? 
Without man’s genius to correlate and interpret, and 
his science to construct and direct nature’s forces, 
how explain their creation or'purpose in the world? 
From whatever standpoint the history of creation 
may be approached, it will appear that the later 
advent of man on the earth was not an afterthought 
with God, but a divinely delayed event till his plans 
were complete and the earth were ready for its il- 

15 (225) 


226 A Gospel for the New Age 


lustrious guest. Without man on board the world 
would be a ship of mystery; but with him there all 
is well. 

Now, just as the material creation waited for a 
greater than itself to interpret and guide, so the 
powers of man—his reason, intellect, affections, and 
will—wait like a ship in port for the touch of a 
Pilot’s hand. Man’s conditions all demand this. 
Hence his sense of limitations,-his thirst for knowl- 
edge, his instincts of futurity, and his upward look 
(avOpwros) all intimate a needed element in his na- 
ture, without which he could never rest at ease or 
reach conscious perfection, or find the solution of 
life’s problems. View man as we may, the finale in 
his nature has been held up for future and ultimate 
acts of God. As the diamond waits for polishing or 
steel waits for its electric charge to receive its mag- 
netic polarity, so the soul of man waits for the magic 
touch of Spirit to complete its perfection. This 
completion comes not from the acquisition of tem- 
poral things, such as pampering the body with 
wealth, surfeiting the mind with culture, or feasting 
the soul on the beauties of earth. Never till the 
divine plan is complete can man really know himself 
or find the goal of his rightful destiny. 

Since the soul was made for religion, and since 
‘religion is the life of God in the soul,” then not till 
creation’s plans are complied with is the soul com- 
plete, healthy, holy. All those spiritual desires which 
we are accustomed to speak of as soul needs (such 
as “heart hunger,” the “soul reaching out after 
greater things’’) are our imperfect attempts to tell 
of humanity’s age-long craving for that for which 


God with Us 227 


it was created—namely, the indwelling presence 
of the Divine Spirit. Nothing is plainer than this. 
Man’s instincts all point in that direction; his 
nature demands it; and the wretchedness attending 
a godless life lends its confirmation to this truth. 


Gop’s GRACIOUS PRESENCE 


The idea of God’s gracious presence with us is not 
fully met in the thought of God being present every- 
where, in the air, in the sunshine, in gravitation, 
in all the forces of nature. 

Surely God is externally present in all nature; 
for “in him we live, and move, and have our being,” 
and without his upholding presence we should all 
immediately perish. But this sense of his presence 
does not meet spiritual needs. What the soul wants, 
and what we should seek after, is the consciousness 
of God with us in a religious sense. This is the bur- 
den of the Bible’s teachings, and only this will suffice 
for the uplift of humanity. Yet this idea of God’s 
presence with the human soul has not always been 
thought essential to the Christian life, hence the 
weakness of Christianity at times. The conception 
of God as an absent Ruler, an aristocratic Sovereign, 
governing the finished world by fixed laws, and mi- 
raculously breaking into human affairs at rare 
intervals—and his being represented by a vice- 
gerent, with power to forgive or indulge sins—is 
not Christian and never did make for righteousness 
or satisfy the needy souls of men. Such a theology 
was born of paganism, fostered by class distinctions, 
and has been fruitful of untold errors and grievous 
iniquity to blacken the pages of religious history. 


228 A Gospel for the New Age 


What the soul needs, and what our Saviour 
meant to establish on earth, was a domain of welcome 
in the heart of man for God, a consciousness of the 
Spirit’s presence within, sustaining, comforting, and 
guiding the soul. This is what Christianity means 
and is seeking to establish in the earth. ‘“‘Lo, I am 
with you alway, even unto the end of the world,” was 
the climactic declaration of the risen Lord; and his de- 
parture from earth was justified upon the grounds 
that he would send the ‘‘promised Comforter,” to 
abide with men forever and guide them into all 
truth. This Comforter is the life and power of the 
Christian religion. He has access to the human 
heart in a manner not possible to the physical pres- 
ence of our Lord himself. 

Just this doctrine of the divine presence is the 
crux of the conflict between materialism and vital 
godliness. Spiritual facts are not discernible by 
laboratory methods, hence the lack of sympathetic 
knowledge on the part of lukewarm scientists in 
matters religious. They seem to take a pride in 
their ignorance of such things and think it not pos- 
sible to find out God. They may be strictly within 
the limits of scientific knowledge and may correctly 
represent their cult; but they divulge a class secret 
in two directions: (1) They do not ring clear and 
true to their native instincts; and (2) they show that 
they have not discovered the real nature of religion. 
They may be versed in the technicalities of religion 
and be familiar with Church government and the 
rules of routine worship. Anyone who can read 
may know all this. But the deep secrets of Chris- 
tian character and vital godliness are beyond the 


God with Us 229 


range of the materialist’s knowledge, hence his 
graceful silence on such subjects. An agnostic is 
an alien here, otherwise his self-chosen title were a 
misnomer. Personal piety and agnosticism are 
mutually preclusive terms. In the same company 
are to be classed all those who love darkness rather 
than light, for they know not the deep secrets of the 
Spirit and cannot speak the dialect of the kingdom. 


HAS Gop FORGOTTEN Us? 


There is a distressing religious condition abroad 
to-day, as many live their religion, that is causing 
alarm to serious-minded souls. They ask: ‘‘ What is 
the matter with the world? Has God forgotten 
us, that we do not feel his presence as we once did?” 
This as a world condition is altogether man’s fault 
and not God’s, for God is “the same yesterday, to- 
day, and forever,” and not a Being of capricious 
whims. The source of religious dearth, into which 
many obscuring elements enter, is entirely of human 
origin. Let us notice a few of these elements. 

The scientific method. This has been a prolific 
agency in hiding God’s face from us. An irreverent 
scientist is a most objectionable character religious- 
ly, especially when obsessed with scientific self- 
importance, thinking there is no truth but his, and 
the only way of finding the truth is by his material- 
istic method. This would coldly pry into all secrets, 
analyze all substances, and weigh all qualities. The 
brilliancy of the diamond is as nothing in the scien- 
tific laboratory. The gem must be reduced to its 
ultimate constituency, crushed to powder to de- 
termine its density and composition. The weird 


230 A Gospel for the New Age 


enchantment of the mocking bird’s music is ignored. 
The angelic spirit of the wood nymph flits away from 
beneath the dissecting knife of him who would dis- 
cover the make of the vocal chords that could produce 
such music. The mystery and sacredness of life 
are forgotten by him who would set his camera to 
photograph the soul as it escapes from the body at 
death. 

It is not science we are objecting to, but its ma- 
terialistic methods. Do we not find Vergil long ago 
claiming that scientific knowledge of nature is not 
the only way of arriving at the truths of nature; 
that her loveliness is also a revelation; that the soul 
which is in unison with her is justified by its own 
peace? Science is schooling the world to want 
everything demonstrated to the eye, to be gazed at 
without thought. Nothing is more human and 
natural than this desire to see things. The craze 
for the spectacular is the cheapest kind of sensation, 
and the sensationalism has always been in inverse 
ratio to spirituality. When sensation rises religion 
lowers; yet the two are often confused. But re- 
ligion is a thing of the spirit and not spectacular, 
not found in the latest ‘‘movie” thrill, but in soul 
communion with God. Here is discovered the 
difficulty in adapting Bible scenes to picture show 
use. They are rarely dramatic, and have in them 
little to foster modern sensationalism. They are 
mostly quiet life scenes embodying religious truths 
which bring God near. 

This truth was brought to a crisis in the Congress 
of Religions in Chicago some years ago. One of 
the most eminent men of the South was solicited to 


God with Us 28i 


appear in the program to represent a branch of 
Protestant Christianity. This was thought com- 
plimentary, and the choice of the speaker was deemed 
excellent, as he was able to hold championship 
with any of the religions of the world. But when 
the time came for the great religious pageant one 
chair was empty. On that platform were long- 
bearded Magi, phylacteried Rabbis, sad-eyed Bud- 
dhists, and unmanicured Hindu priests. As the 
performance went forward bands deafened and 
drums thundered. Orators proclaimed their themes, 
to be applauded by their own constituency and by 
them alone. But no Atticus G. Haygood stood up 
to pantomime the Christian religion; and many were 
glad. Christianity does not shrink from comparison 
with other religions; but it is a spirit to be felt, a life 
to be lived, an intimate relation between the soul and 
God—not a thing to be visualized and gaped at 
with wonderment. 

This spirit-deadening process is logical enough. 
The spectacular makes appeal to shallow, unthink- 
ing minds, and in no way encourages deep thinking 
or meditative moods. Besides, it is in direct line 
with the materialistic tendency of the times, all of 
which would hide God’s face from us. Here we are 
dealing with conditions, not theories; and the ma- 
terialistic tendency is a most potent condition, 
seen most plainly in the standard of values it sets up. 
That which cannot be weighed and measured or 
reduced to definite formula, or is not of present 
marketable value, is consigned to the junk heap. 
That which does not contribute to present pleasures 
or profit is not considered worth while. Among 


232 A Gospel for the New Age 


such forgotten things are the unseen and the spirit- 
ual. Who to-day remembers St. Paul’s great state- 
ment, “The things that are seen are temporal, 
while the things that are unseen are eternal’? 
Who seeks unseen soul qualities or truth for truth’s 
sake? or counts material losses a blessing which 
may let God into the soul to reign there? The one 
chief aim to-day is not to discover the cause and pur- 
pose of pain, but to find an opiate for the pain and 
let the guilty ‘“‘get by.”” The very providences which 
God meant as finger boards by the wayside to point 
the way of safety are made an occasion of soul 
confusion in the mad rush for material pleasures. 


THE HEALTHY MAN’S RELIGION 


Our age seems to have lost the sense of spirituality 
and has come to prefer the “‘healthy man’s religion.” 
This appeals to the most shallow mind, since it 
requires no serious thinking or high purpose in life. 
They of this faith are serene, are seldom sick, and 
have abundance of social pleasures. On them na- 
ture seems to smile benignly, since they have abun- 
dance of prosperity, friends are numerous, and busi- 
ness is good. What care they for more, or what 
better could they wish? All is well to-day; why care 
for the future or distress themselves over a lack of 
the divine presence? Does God not know all things, 
and is he not able to guide the world according to 
his liking? Surely he is a God of infinite goodness 
and mercy; and since he is a being of love, will he 
not care for his own? Who stops to remember that 
‘‘a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of 
the things which he possesseth’’? 


God with Us 233 


Said the late Peter Forsyth: ‘‘ We have passed into 
a kind of holiday freedom, speaking of piety as a 
natural state, enjoying our fine sentiment of rever- 
ence for God and declaring our great admiration 
for Christ and his beautiful teachings, all on the 
plane of nature itself.” Many have come to con- 
gratulate themselves on being “‘as good naturally as 
the majority of Church members,” and that without 
a particle of repentance for sin, or a thought of con- 
version to God, or having him to reign in their hearts. 
“We are better by nature,” say they, ‘‘than our 
pious parents were; for are we not better educated, 
more cultured and refined? Being better informed, 
more liberal and more intelligent than they, we do 
not need the religion of our pious parents.”’ Thus, 
to many, religion has become flabby, self-indulgent, 
and extremely worldly. Horace Bushnell saw plain- 
ly this tendency in his day and said: ‘‘Where we 
shall land, or be stranded rather, is plainly to be 
seen. Christianity is fast becoming a lost art.” 


A LIBERAL THEOLOGY 


Much of the lack of a sense of the divine presence 
may be traceable to the swing back from the more 
serious theology of our fathers. To them sin was a 
serious evil, right was right, and God most real. To 
be religious was the one business of their lives. The 
religious teaching in their day was that the sinner 
was ‘‘totally depraved’”—without religious ability 
and incapable of a religious desire and of an approach 
to God. Hence before he could be religious at all 
he must be given a “new nature,’ by which he 
might hope to approach the throne of God and to 


234 A Gospel for the New Age 


live a religious life. This cast of religion our ancestors 
inherited from their Puritan fathers. This was the 
religion they brought with them across the ocean 
when they fled from persecution and came to America 
to build a ‘“‘new world” to the glory of God, wherein 
they might “‘worship him according to the dictates 
of their own conscience,” in which freedom alone 
God can be truly worshiped. 

Men speak of this as a “harsh” religion and call 
their morals ‘‘severe’’; and the term “‘Puritan”’ is 
often used as a term of reproach. But they who lived 
it were the people who defied the storms of the seas, 
subdued vast forests, established a popular govern- 
ment and education, bred a learned ministry, 
built up righteousness in the land, and planted re- 
ligion in the center of the State. In the stern reality 
of the rough pioneer days, with a new world to 
build and herculean tasks to perform, the sense of 
the need of God’s protection and grace was very 
great, and pious people felt that they must live very 
close to him. Their recoil from the laxity of English 
customs made them hostile to mirth and pleasure 
seeking. They had scant time to spare for pastime 
frivolities. Besides, such a waste of time was con- 
sidered sinful and to be renounced as a part of the 
“vain pomp and glory of the world.’”’ Much of this 
was the accident of the age, it is true, and as the 
times changed a different spirit emerged. Much of 
the pioneer life was past, and the people had time to 
devote to pleasurable recreation. Then a ‘“‘new 
theology’’ had swept over the land, which held that 
men were created with a religious nature capable of 


God with Us 235 


being developed along with other faculties, and that 
man was able to seek God as his highest duty. 

By holding such views Horace Bushnell raised 
quite a storm among the theologians in his day, 
and his teachings were branded as rankest heresy. 
It was not surprising that a reaction from the old 
sterner theology should take place; and instead of 
the earlier rigidity we have the new tolerance; 
instead of the unlovable morality came a new appre- 
ciation of the beautiful, and in place of the “‘sacred 
gloom”’ in religion we have the ‘‘joy of salvation.” 
But may we not well ask, Was this transition a 
moral gain or a religious loss? The answer will 
depend upon what we may have lost or gained in 
religious reality. If in the transition process, while 
getting rid of the old uninviting garb of the Puritan 
religion, we have kept the vital godliness of the Puri- 
tan faith and self-surrender, then we have made 
progress. But the fear is that while reaching out 
for the joy and the beauties of religious life we have 
let go the “gold” of the old-time religion. Instead 
of the more beautiful growth of a flower in religion, 
we have had the swing of the pendulum and have 
swung too far. If this be true, it were the calamity 
of the age. 

Hailing with joy the “emancipation from the 
sterner morality” of the fathers, the world has swung 
back to where the true sense of sin and of righteous- 
ness has been lost. Men no longer seem to know what 
real religion is. Kindly feelings and love of neighbors 
are taken for religion. Generosity and humane, 
brotherly sentiments are considered righteousness, 


236 A Gospel for the New Age 


whether God is at all considered or has an inch of 
welcome space in the heart. 

The world seems to have been blind to the law of 
spiritual growth and thinks that the highest expres- 
sion of religion is joy. Men are not made holy by 
banqueting in pleasure or reveling in the beauties of 
nature. Such things are the results, not the causes 
of religion. ‘‘Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, 
and all these things shall be added,” was the teach- 
ing of Jesus. To seek righteousness first is to make 
possible the natural flower of religion—joy, peace, 
love, hope—the fruits of the Spirit; but to seek the 
fruit first, before the growth of the plant, is to re- 
verse the order of nature and attempt the impossible. 
In religion this means the folly of attempting to 
develop the higher life and beauty of character from 
the roots of self-indulgence, and to scorn the teach- 
ing of Jesus—which was first self-denial, then the 
sweetness and joy of religion. 

Our age seems to have lost sight of this triumph 
and gladness, as well as the sense of sin. Instead 
of being heartbroken over the sense of guilt before 
God, and wanting to cry to him for pardon and savy- 
ing grace, men stand bolt upright before God in 
their self-righteousness and congratulate themselves 
on how the world smiles on them in their prosperity, 
as if to be “arrayed in silks and fare sumptuously 
every day’ were a sure mark of God’s gracious ap- 
proval, and they not such bad men after all. Where 
the sense of the need of God’s grace and saving power 
has faded from our religion, what wonder that we 
are left to grope in spiritual impotency. We toil 
and stress, but, like Alice in Wonderland, we race 


God with Us 237 


our best but get nowhere, all because of the lack of 
divine grace and power. Our churches are amply 
provided with the latest equipment; still we are 
defeated and seem to forget that souls cannot be 
saved by mechanical means or bought with gold at 
the bar of God. 

THE IDEA OF GOD 


The sense of the nearness or absence of the divine 
presence depends in a large measure upon the con- 
ception one may have of God, as taught us in our 
theology. In the early days of Christianity, when 
the Church was young, religion was largely an ex- 
perience rather than a dogma. Then God was felt 
to be near and his presence was a power. But if a 
thought is to be taught to others, it must be systema- 
tized. Thus we have gotten our theology. The idea 
of God has varied according to thought garbs of the 
ages down through which it has come. Arianism 
was among the early attempts to codify theology; 
and in it there was an attempt to bring God near. 
But it did the very reverse by holding that it was an 
impossibility for God to incarnate himself and feel 
the touch of human sympathy and the throb of 
human sorrow. The result was what we know to- 
day as an ‘“‘absentee divinity,’ which destroys 
the sense of God’s presence entirely. Man came to 
think of God hardly at all; and divine fellowship 
was not a part of religion. The result of such an 
idea of God can plainly be seen; yet this theology 
held sway for a great number of years. 

In later years Calvinism arose to assert the 
supreme sovereignty of God. While this theology 
held to the great human need of God and to the 


238 A Gospel for the New Age 


gift of a new nature, it destroyed fellowship with God 
by teaching that men cannot certainly know that 
they are saved and therefore the sons of God. 
They may only “hope” that they have such a 
high heritage. Great and good men groped their 
way through life with the flickering light as it shines 
in some of the old hymns, a few of which may still 
be found in the hymnals of to-day. Such a thought 
as the ‘‘joy of salvation’”’ seems not to have entered 
as an element of the Calvinistic theology. Master- 
ful as that theology is, and the vast good its adher- 
ents have accomplished in the world, it lacks the 
sense of sins forgiven and the gladness of a definite 
knowledge of sonship with God and his abiding 
presence with us. Yet Calvinism did much to offset 
the extreme Mysticism, with its tendency to exag- 
gerate the idea of communion with God, to weaken 
reverence, and to withdraw God from the progres- 
sive life of the world. To know God, the Mystics 
taught, one must withdraw from the world; and to 
have sweet communion with him, one must “walk 
down the valley of silence, down the dark valley 
alone.”” In their prayers, often, language is used 
which seems bereft of proper reverence and that 
verges on flippant familiarity with the Almighty. 


EVANGELISM OFT ABUSED 


Growing directly out of Mysticism came modern 
evangelism with its realistic faith, its buoyant 
sacred songs, and its holy living, which has made 
the religion of Jesus a power in the world. With 
its belief in religious freedom, the need of conversion, 
the witness of the Spirit, and the world-wide re- 


God with Us 239 


demption of man, it has surpassed all other beliefs 
in making real the sense of the divine presence and 
in making Christianity a world force. 

Yet this mighty agency has a tendency to exag- 
gerate emotionalism and put feelings forward to the 
neglect of the will. While emotion accompanies 
religion, and some men would make it the all of re- 
ligion and say with one that “‘religion is all feelings,” 
yet it is the shallowest feature of religion. There 
is no ethical value in it whatever. Yet many have 
come to look upon emotion as most essential, and 
to seek this rather than that which causes it, putting 
the effect for the cause, forgetful of the fact that 
our Saviour said: “‘If any man will do his will, he 
shall know of the doctrine.’”’ Nothing is more de- 
ceptive and fleeting than an emotion; yet some in- 
nocently believe emotionalism to be spirituality. 
By cultivating this unduly the human has been 
given supremacy, while the more permanent and 
real—the divine—has been let to slip from our 
grasp, thus allowing vital Christianity to become an 
unknown something to many. 

So great an event as the conversion of the soul 
and the coming of God into the heart must of neces- 
sity produce some blessed emotion—a memorable 
fact ever. This experience rightly belongs to Chris- 
tianity; and yet we know there can be great emo- 
tion where there is no religion whatever. Jonathan 
Edwards—the father of the “Great Awakening,” 
when the modern revival movement in America 
began, in which there was great emotion—was slowly 
driven to oppose all ‘‘bodily effects,’’ as he termed 
them, believing them to be a “falling away from 


240 A Gospel for the New Age 


the high privilege and glory of true religion.” The 
religion of Christ is a spiritual religion, and its true 
manifestations are spiritual; but to exalt emotion- 
alism at times to the extreme, expect this to last, 
and be disappointed if it does not, as though God 
had forsaken the soul, is to do Christianity a serious 
hurt. Emotionalism which carries people beyond all 
discretion brings religion into disfavor with right- 
minded people and discourages the sweet reality 
of Christian experience. Many hearts have been 
saddened by the wane of “old-time religion”’ and 
joy in the Holy Spirit. This joyous salvation is 
both an essential and an evidence of religious reality. 
It was the promised gift of the Saviour, abiding and 
blessed. But when the joy has gone from our re- 
ligion, the Spirit from our devotion, sacredness from 
our songs and prayers, what wonder that we feel as 
if God had forgotten us, while we approach him with 
lightness and worship him with our lips only! 


DEVOTIONAL READING 


Good religious books have always been a blessed 
means of grace. Through this means God speaks to 
the soul. In days of old men spoke as they were 
moved by the Holy Spirit, and their messages have 
come down to us as the Word of God, which has 
been the lamp of life to a benighted world. Men read 
the Bible and feel that God is speaking to them 
therein. But the Holy Spirit has not ceased to move 
holy men to put their meditations into literary form 
so as to do men good. The world has its millions of 
souls, like Enoch, who walk with God; and these 
men in all ages and lands tell us of their communion 


God with Us 241 


with God and blessed fellowship with him. By them 
God is speaking to the world in our day. If we have 
brought articles of commerce from every continent 
of earth to increase our material comforts, why may 
we not gather the fruit of meditative minds from all 
around the earth and let our souls feast upon it? 
This is our privilege; yet how we do let our souls 
starve while feeding on the frothy fiction of the day! 
Good and helpful fiction there is. The best of 
thought is expressed in that way, and there are avail- 
able devotional books in abundance; why then should 
we allow our souls to perish with hunger? The open 
Bible is ever before us, and St. Paul’s instruction 
to young Timothy, “Give attention to reading,” 
is still a part of God’s unrepealed law. 


THE LAITY Not To BLAME 


In the matter of being worldly and not realizing 
the divine presence, our laymen are to be exonerated 
from the chief blame. It is a fact of history that in 
any age in modern times, when there has been a 
religious dearth, the ministry has been particeps 
criminis. Wherever there has been a lack of re- 
ligious vitality, the shepherds of the sheep, whether 
priests or pastors, have been remiss in watchfulness 
and wanting in spiritual power. Not only the re- 
ligious deadness but much of the unbelief of the times 
may be found among the ministry. Martineau has 
said: “‘For much of the Agnosticism of the age, 
Gnosticism in theology (rationalism) is to blame.’’! 
In the darkest days of English religious history, 
the days of George III, Mr. Blackstone, of eminent 


1Studies in Religion,” p. 1, xl (Ed. 1888). 
16 


242 A Gospel for the New Age 


law fame, had the curiosity to visit the prominent 
churches in London and hear every preacher of note 
in the city. His report was that he “did not hear 
a single sermon which had any more Christianity in 
it than the writings of Cicero; and it would have been 
impossible to discover whether the preachers were 
followers of Confucius, Mohammed, or Christ.’ 
This same skepticism may be found in some of the 
pulpits of to-day. 

Recently the late Peter Forsyth, addressing an 
audience of preachers, took occasion to stress the 
evangelical consciousness and daily experience of 
sins forgiven. His address created quite a stir, and 
at its conclusion a clergyman came forward to ask if 
the speaker was rightly understood, saying that to 
his ‘‘certain knowledge such was the experience of 
but a few preachers among his associates.” “If 
this be true,’”’ said the speaker, “‘I need not add an- 
other word to account for the lack of power and au- 
thority. It is not more religion that is needed, 
but a better grade of religion. For all this lack of 
pulpit power there is but one cure, and that is a deep- 
er sense, not only of our unworthiness and our eternal 
ruin, but for the love of God and the cross of Christ 
and a closer walk with him.” 


Gop STILL WITH Us 


God has never withdrawn himself from the world. 
He is the same loving Father abiding with us to help 
and deliver. This truth is evidenced by the beacon 
lights of history. Looking back over two millen- 
niums, we see that there has never been an age so 
dark but there were to be found souls in tune with 


God with Us 248 


the Infinite—real oracles who could hear the heaven- 
ly voices and interpret the ways of God to men. 
Christianity has never been without its ‘“‘other- 
worldly”? souls, men with splendor of vision like 
John the beloved disciple; golden-mouthed men like 
Chrysostom and Savonarola; souls with sovereignty 
of mind like Luther, Knox, and Huss, defying prin- 
cipalities and powers and taking their stand for 
liberty of thought and God at all hazards; seraphic 
souls like Fénelon, Wesley, Finney, and Enoch 
Marvin—lIsraelites indeed who as princes prevailed 
with God and with men. 

There are such souls in the world to-day with the 
same sublime faith and instinct for God, whose at- 
mosphere is the divine presence; but somehow we fail 
to realize their true character; and we look askance 
at them as rare creatures from a distant clime. 
An old friend of Mr. Wesley’s, after hearing him 
preach, wrote him saying: “‘ Your presence creates an 
awe as if you were an inhabitant of another world.” 
In a very true sense he was, for he lived in the habit- 
ual presence of another world more real to him than 
was the Kingdom of Great Britain. When tempted 
to tarry by the roadside and enjoy the pleasures of 
conversation, he said: “‘This)is sweet, but there is 
an eternity.”” Some one said of him that “he thought 
only of religion’’; but religion has God in it, and this 
kept his heart aglow, and in its light and with its 
restraints his life was spent and his noble work ac- 
complished. 

Of President Finney it was said: ‘‘He looked and 
spoke and acted like a man handling the invisible 
and palpable realities of the eternal world there in 


244 A Gospel for the New Age 


the presence of his congregation.’”’ The influence of 
such men is simply immense. They make the spirit- 
ual stream of life to flow at high tide, and let us 
feel the presence of God as never before. Yet the 
world wants to classify them as men much out of 
date and ill suited to our hard, commonplace world, 
men who have come to walk with us for a season. 
Of one? it was said recently: “It is worth his salary 
to have him to walk our streets.” To have the 
shadow of such men to fall on us as they pass is a 
benediction; yet we are forgetful of the fact that such 
men are of common clay like ourselves, and that we 
may drink of the same fountain and have the same 
radiance of soul as they. Heavenly voices are vibrant 
everywhere, but we will not pause to hear them. 
Mighty power is throbbing all about us, but we are 
too much steeped in the world to feel its thrill. 
How busy we are regaling ourselves with ‘“Chris- 
tianized sociability, gilt-edged materialism, and 
scrappy culture,” all dead to the fact that we know 
next to nothing of world-redeeming religion and the 
indwelling of the Spirit of God! 


MAN’S DEEPER NEEDS 


While we may rejoice in having reached a saner 
theology and a more adequate idea of God, man’s 
needs are deeper than all this. We cannot be satis- 
fied by remembering, with John Fiske, “‘God is 
imminent in the world, identifying himself with the 
daily sequences of life’; or with James Freeman 
Clarke, that ‘‘The universe is a vast loom whose 
flying shuttles are ever busily weaving the garments 


2Theodore F. Brewer. 





God with Us 245 


of God”; nor yet with Lynn Harold Hough when 
he says, ‘‘God is immediately present as a companion 
to every human being who ever came into the world. 
To live in the world is to have definite and prolonged 
contact with the God who is infinitely near to us all.’’s 
All this is beautiful and is blessed to remember as 
a natural fact, but such beautiful sentiments may 
be entertained by one who is a pantheist without one 
particle of personal piety or sense of the inward 
presence of God. 

What imperfect human nature wants and should 
seek to realize is the “infinite nearness of God” in 
a deeply religious sense; remembering that in every 
possible manner God is seeking just this kind of 
access to the soul, there to reign and comfort and 
bless. Day by day and night after night God is 
pressing his claim to a place and recognition in the 
soul he has created. This fact is felt by all who will 
consider. When told of God and his love, Helen 
Keller said: ‘‘I have always known him, but I did 
not know his name.” In the foreign mission field 
there came to light a woman who, on hearing for 
the first time of Jesus and his love, exclaimed: “‘O, 
this is he whom I have found and have with me all 
the time.”’ This was in darkést Africa, yet it is the 
same abiding presence that is felt by the cultured 
Christian mother in dedicating her tender babe to 
_ her Lord; the same that was felt by the young patri- 
arch at Bethel on waking from his prophetic dream 
when he said: ‘‘Surely the Lord is in this place; and 
I knew it not.’”’ This same presence is felt by the 
hero of the cross while bivouacking on life’s battle 


«Productive Beliefs,” p. 161. (Fleming H. Revell Co.) 


246 A Gospel for the New Age 


front. God’s presence has been the secret of the 
martyrs’ strength as they stood up bravely and died 
gladly for the truth which has come to mean so 
much to us. It is the source of all soul-redeeming 
agencies, as well as the clue to all victorious Chris- 
tian living. It was the swan-song of the hero of 
Epworth who, after a life of well-nigh miraculous 
endurance, and dying at the ripe age of eighty- 
seven, said with his last breath: “‘The best of all is, 
God is with us.” 

There is no time or place where this sweet experi- 
ence may not be realized; but it does not come from 
a faith in an impersonal cosmic force at work in the 
world, pushing mankind forward without their 
consent or codéperation into an ideal realm where 
sin and strife are forever a thing of the past. Right- 
eousness is distinctly a thing of human willing. God 
does not drive; he woos the willing heart. Nor can 
the presence be realized in a religious way by a 
scientific research of the universe. Sir Isaac Newton 
declared that he drew feelingly near to God, not 
while sweeping the heavens with his telescope and 
witnessing the marvelous wonders of creation, but 
in his private room while reading his Bible and on 
his knees in prayer. Nor does a sense of the divine 
presence come as a time allotment in man’s upward 
march from primeval savagery, but from a personal 
willing and fixed desire for such an experience. 

In one of his great books, ‘‘Donald Grant,” 
George Macdonald describes the discovery of a, 
dungeon in the basement of a castle, where chains’ 
were found about the bones of those who had perished 
there. But the dungeon proved to be an abandoned 


God with Us 247 


chapel. In the sacred place where God was wont to 
be met and praised souls had been tortured to death. 
Such indeed is the human heart. In the temple, 
where God would gloriously meet and bless the wait- 
ing spirit, sin and death are found. But, as Macdon- 
ald describes, clear out the rubbish, open up the 
windows, let in the light, and God will come into 
his own and start up sweet music there again. It 
is within that we are to find and know God. “Turn 
to thy heart,’’ says William Law, “and thy heart 
will find its Saviour, its God, within itself. Thou 
seest, hearest, and feelest nothing of God because 
thou seekest for him with thine outward eyes. 
Thou seekest for him in books, in the controversial- 
ists, in the Church and outward exercises; but there 
thou wilt not find him till thou find him in thy heart. 
Seek for him in thy heart and thou wilt never seek 
in vain; for there he dwelleth; there is the seat of his 
light and Holy Spirit.” 

Men may speak of this as mystical, and such in- 
deed it is. But the word “mystical” has two widely 
different meanings. To the mind not cultured in 
spiritual values it means “that which is obscure 
and far off.”’ To the deeply religious soul it means 
the conscious presence of God and his spiritual il- 
lumination—that something which gives the soul 
strength, vision, and power in swaying the life’s 
forces for human uplift. The mystic presence of 
God is anything but far off; it is infinitely near to 
us. 
The archives of religious history are filled with 
instances of men who have felt deeply, intimately, 
and irrefutably the near and actual presence of God. 


248 A Gospel for the New Age 


The Unseen is not only deeply felt, but vividly felt, 
regarded as a thing of deep significance, and is 
experienced in most cases with inexplicable joy. 
James Russell Lowell records in his “Letters” a 
memorable instance: ““As I was speaking (on spirit- 
ual matters) the whole system seemed to rise up 
before me, like a vague destiny out of the abyss. 
I never before felt the Spirit of God so keenly in me 
and around me. The air seemed to vibrate to and 
fro with the presence of a Something, I knew not 
what. I spoke with the calmness and clearness of a 
prophet.’’4 

In the Atlantic Monthly a writer gives even a more 
graphic experience: ‘‘Once out of all the gray days 
of my life I have looked into the heart of reality; 
I have witnessed the truth; I have seen life as it 
really is—ravishingly, ecstatically, madly beautiful, 
and full to overflowing with wild joy and a value 
unspeakable. For those glorified moments I was in 
love with everything living before me—the trees, 
the little birds flying, the people who came and went. 
There was nothing alive that was not a miracle; 
just to be alive was itself a miracle. My very soul 
flew out of me in great joy.’® This is life attuned to 
heaven’s harmony. 

Such moments are generic to real religion and 
have been felt by millions of devout, trustful souls. 
To such souls the world is perfect. There is no fever 
of confusion, but rapture and rest. To some degree, 
in religious devotions, a momentous crisis, resigna- 
tion to calamity or joy of deliverance, souls have felt 
the enveloping oneness of the Divine most really. 


4“Tetters,” Vol. I, p. 75. Op. cit., Vol. 117, p. 592. 


God with Us 249 


MAN’s SOUL CAPACITY 


In every man there is a greater something than 
merely a religious instinct or habit of worship, and 
that something is a soul capacity for God. But for 
this man’s instinctive search for God would be futile, 
for how could he recognize God after he had found 
him? Man alone of all God’s creatures can grow and 
increase till God finds a dwelling place in his heart. 
Man’s life is blessed in proportion to the manner in 
which he follows the laws of his spiritual being. 
Thus he discovers his own capacities and life destiny, 
and that implies the indwelling of the Spirit of God. 
“The chamber is not only prepared,” says Henry 
Drummond, “but the Guest is expected and missed 
till he arrives. Till then the soul longs and yearns 
and pines.” The universal soul wail is, “‘I perish 
with hunger”; but there is grandeur in that wail, 
since it is the entrée of the Spirit of God. 

The soul of man was not created with a fixed 
station in life like a diamond, a crystal, or a plant. 
He has no such limited realm or circumscribed sta- 
tion. He is created for growth, for regeneration, 
and for perfection in religious fullness till fitted to 
be the temple of the Lord. ; Then it is that God 
“‘tabernacles with man” and is found dwelling there. 
If man eannot find God dwelling within himself, 
he cannot find him anywhere in the world. This fact 
of God’s tabernacling with man makes beautiful 
much of the doings of the Creator and lights up vast 
regions of thought that would otherwise remain a 
mystery forever. In accomplishing this fact God 
spares himself no pains, not even the death of his 
beloved Son. Why then should anyone think that 


250 A Gospel for the New Age 


God had forgotten us or had withdrawn his Spirit 
from the world? If by our indifference to the soul’s 
well-being or progress we shut God out of his own 
and cause its wreck and ruin, it is God’s temple 
still, only scarred and blackened by the fires of evil— 
all the more majestic as a ruin, perhaps, if it did not 
prove its native grandeur by the destruction it 
resisted in working out its salvation! 


How ACCOMPLISH THE FACT? 


In the light of personality and its sway by motives, 
the ever-present problem is, What inducement may 
be brought to bear upon mankind to enable them to 
realize the divine Presence? Just how to awaken a 
heart hunger for God is indeed the problem of Chris- 
tianity. No invariable formula can be found by 
which to accomplish the fact, one that will apply to 
all alike. Our Saviour, with all his wisdom and beau- 
tiful simplicity, did not always succeed at this point. 
““Many went away, and did not believe on him,” 
is the statement of the record. Yet he laid down this 
principle: ‘‘If a man love me, he will keep my words: 
and my Father will love him, and we will come unto 
him, and make our abode with him.”’ Now, what 
could be more simple than the love of Jesus? To 
have Christ is to have life, and this is to have God’s 
presence within. Yet no scientist can explain the 
process any more than he can explain the germinat- 
ing of a seed in the ground. The best that can be 
said on the subject is only an analogy, a mere hint 
of the unique truth. 

To have Christ is to feel the warming influence 
of his divine presence. Being created for God, we 


God with Us 251 


may know him, not as an all-pervading Essence, 
but as a Person, a Friend and Father always with 
us; not spoiling our natures by taking away our soul 
liberty, but by fostering our strength and encourag- 
ing every holy endeavor. We may know him as we 
know ourselves. ‘‘Since we are God’s offspring, we 
are to live in his Fatherhood” and receive our final 
completeness in the consciousness of his infinite 
goodness and abiding presence. 


THE WILL TO BE HOLY 


Still the problem remains, how to induce souls to 
seek the divine presence—who shall do it, when, and 
where? This simple process of finding God—so 
simple that a child may know it, yet deep enough to 
engage the greatest mind—has two sides, a divine 
and a human side. The divine side calls for repent- 
ance, for being born again, for being renewed in the 
spirit of the mind, and having Christ formed within 
as the hope of glory. But all these are passive terms, 
suggestive of submission rather than action. In the 
great enterprise is there nothing that man can do? 
The doctrine of ‘‘human inability” as a theory of 
religion was never satisfactory and never will be. 
Any scheme which bridges over man’s free agency 
and personal responsibility is untrue to human nature 
and false to God. While God works within, helping 
man to will and to do that which pleases God, it 
becomes man’s chief duty to ‘‘work out his own 
salvation with fear and trembling,” thus being the 
master of his own destiny. As a coworker with God, 
man must act his part in the drama of life. He can- 
not do God’s part, nor can God do his, else it would 


202 A Gospel for the New Age 


be God’s act and not man’s. Man’s part is to have 
a will to be holy, to make God’s will his will, and to 
so walk with God as to starve out the old life and 
nurture the new by abiding in Christ as the branch 
abides in the vine. Thus God’s presence will be 
real and blessed, as we walk this troubled mundane 
path. 
PRAYER THE CHIEF MEANS — 

After all, the chief means of securing the abiding 
presence of God is prayer. The Christian’s life is a 
life of prayer—prayer for divine help, for knowing 
the will of God, for communion with him as a child 
with a father, and for strength and guidance in the 
struggles of life. Great Christians in all ages have 
been mighty men of prayer. Such indeed was our 
Saviour. How can a prayerless soul be a live Chris- 
tian? A prayerless church is a dead church and a 
reproach to any community. Prayer is the power 
house of victory always. 

God comes into the heart only upon personal 
willing. Let men desire his indwelling, let them seek 
this of God and earnestly long for it, ““hungering and 
thirsting after righteousness,” and they shall be 
filled; and never again shall it be asked, ‘‘ What is the 
matter with the world? has God forgotten us?” 
For he will walk with us, be in us, be our God, and 
we shall be his people, “‘his sons and his daughters.”’ 
This joy will be realized, not in the rapt frenzy of 
the dancing dervishes, nor yet in the ‘‘enthusiasm”’ 
of the Pietists who in the days of the Reformation 
in France and England made the very name of reli- 
gion to be a reproach among right-minded people. 
But the glory will appear in the sweet reasonable- 


God with Us 253 


ness and love as manifested in the character of our 
blessed Lord, and which we may know for ourselves 
as the gift of the Father, fulfilling the promise, “‘ Lo, 
I am with youalway, even unto the end of the world.” 

Love seeks companionship and bears the image of 
the beloved in the heart. If we love God, we will 
want his image in us all the time as our redeeming 
Father and Friend. 

How blessed the experience attending the realiza- 
tion of the Unseen Presence! When this is realized, 
life is clear, beautiful, and complete. What other- 
wise seems dark and perhaps cruel shines out in a 
setting of divine wisdom and love; what seemed con- 
trary and fragmentary finds its rightful place in the 
divine mosaic. What natural ideal is ever complete- 
ly realized? Some perfection remains to be desired. 
Yet in religion, when God is felt to be near and his 
will dominant, perfection is found, if found at all, 
and harmony and ultimate sufficiency prevail. Then, 
apart from reasoning or any penetration of the in- 
tellect, the divine presence, when intense, gives man 
a “translucent insight’’ during which he sees deep- 
ly, calmly, and joyously into the beauty of the eter- 
nal order of things. This mystic sense seems to rise 
to the higher level of consciousness in which one can 
realize a universe more significant and orderly than 
can possibly be known by the senses. Be the sky 
dark or clear a sure consciousness asserts 

God’s in his heaven— 

All’s right with the world!’ 
and a calm joy follows this sense of God’s sovereign 
sway. Then it is that our religion becomes dynamic 
and most real. 





CHAPTER XII 


THE ETHICAL REIGN OF GOD 


**Since God loves us, all things must be for the best.’’ 
—German Proverb. 


‘“Be not deceived; God is not mocked; for whatsoever a 
man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth 
to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that 
soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.”’— 
Galatians vi. 7, 8. 

‘They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirl- 
wind ’’—the cyclone.—Hosea viii. 7. 


‘‘The heavens declare the glory of God, 
And the firmament showeth his handiwork.”’ 
_—David. 


CHAPTER XII 
THE ETHICAL REIGN OF GOD 


MAN is by creation essentially a ruler. He must 
have his domain, whether it be an empire or the 
ethical world within his own personality, where 
none but he dare give command. Yet this same 
born sovereign is never so happy as when he feels 
that he himself is wisely and well governed. He 
feels that he too is under authority. Even in the 
exercise of his personal liberty—that something in 
which his moral manhood rests—he finds this 
precious boon sweeter and safer when kept under the 
sway of the thought that for this he must give an 
account to his Maker. Under no circumstances can 
he escape the sway of a Power greater than himself, 

That there is a God, the Creator of all things, 
whose throne is the center of the universe, whose 
will is supreme law, and that this same God is our 
merciful Heavenly Father who governs the world by 
the law of love, is perhaps the greatest thought ever 
conceived by the human intellect. In comparison 
with this all other thoughts pale into insignificance. 
How blessed the thought that this God, ‘““‘whom to 
know aright is life eternal,” is Sovereign over all! 
Yet some would have us to think that the universe, 
with all its matchless grandeur and teeming life, 
came into existence of itself and goes groping 
adrift on the ocean of space without a Pilot’s hand 
to guide its destinies. But no amount of sophistry 


17 (257) 


258 A Gospel for the New Age 


has ever been able to induce mankind to adopt such 
a philosophy. The universe is its own demonstration 
that it is not a creature of chance, and man in- 
stinctively recognizes the need of a divine Ruler. 
In his saner thoughts he would not have it otherwise. 


THE CONSTANT GUIDING HAND 


It was not enough that the worlds should have 
come into existence and life started upon its wonder- 
ful mission. By what power do they continue as 
they are, and by what wisdom shall they be guided 
in the future? The same laws.of intelligent thought, 
which in logical sequence compelled the admission 
of a Creator, demand also the sustaining power 
and guiding hand in all the affairs of life. Who has 
not rejoiced with King David that “The heavens 
declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth 
his handiwork’? And yet is it not a sweeter thought 
still to think and feel that we are held safe in the 
hollow of God’s great hand? 

If the unaided eye beholds a celestial scene which 
awakens such ecstasy of admiration and wonder, 
what must be the awe inspired by viewing the 
heavens through the most powerful telescope, re- 
vealing an empire of blazing suns and revolving 
systems far beyond anything the most fertile im- 
agination can conceive? Amid the splendor of the 
vast universe in which our world is really but a tiny 
speck upon the horizon, astronomers behold God at 
work, pervading, upholding, and guiding all things 
with the majesty of his presence and the constancy 
of his care. 

But in the rapture awakened by God’s vast and 


The Ethical Reign of God 259 


splendid domain these same awe-inspired minds 
have felt the chilling sense of loneliness creeping into 
their hearts, and the question arising, Is it possible 
for God, whose attention is fixed upon all this splen- 
did domain, to find time or be disposed to give at- 
tention to so small a sphere as the earth? Does God 
interest himself with the moral realm of man? Does 
God care for me, a single atom of human life? 

There is a principle in philosophy which teaches 
that it is not possible to give profound attention 
to more that one object at one and the same time. 
What we gain by “‘intention”’ we lose in “extension.” 
When the whole receives concentrated thought, we 
of necessity must lose sight to some extent of the 
individual unit. Now, while this is a law of the 
finite human mind, who does not rejoice that such 
restrictions are not applicable to the mind of God? 
His attention is equally given to all alike. No 
limit can be set to his infinite attention or his provi- 
dent care. What distress of mind would arise if we 
were driven to the conclusion that God in creating 
the universe did so adjust the affairs and set the 
immense machinery to going so perfectly that it no 
longer needed his immediate attention! Hence he - 
withdrew into the infinite beyond to give his atten- 
tion to enterprises of greater moment or to become 
an infinite Idler! 

The study of materialistic science at present has 
the tendency to drift into this dismal swamp. The 
habit of dealing with fixed Jaws in material things 
leads to a desire to apply the same laws to spiritual 
things. But we know that “spiritual things are 
spiritually discerned,” and not subject to material 


260 A Gospel for the New Age 


laws. Being more refined, they belong to a higher 
order of things, and are reached by a different 
approach. Yet the soul of finest faith is often 
troubled with the thought, ‘‘Does God care for the 
world? Can he find time to give to such things as 
human interests? If God does not care for the world, 
what will become of it?” Is ‘“‘fixed fate, free will, 
foreknowledge absolute”? our destiny, while God 
has no immediate concern for us or dealings with us? 

Such questions are not altogether imaginary 
troubles. They spring from the sincerity of honest 
hearts. When the great Daniel Webster came down 
to his dying bed, it was his earnest wish to leave 
behind him a declaration of his belief in the Christian 
religion, so he dictated this confession: ‘‘ Philosophi- 
cal arguments, especially those drawn from the 
vastness of the universe in comparison with the 
apparent insignificance of this globe, have some- 
times shaken my reason for the faith that is in me; 
but my heart assures me and reassures me that the 
gospel of Jesus Christ is a divine reality.’’! 


DISTRESSING HALF TRUTH 


Such doubts and distress are the product of a half 
truth. If the invention of one scientific instrument, 
the telescope, has given occasion for doubting the 
imminence of God and his provident care in all 
human life, the invention of another instrument, the 
microscope, has effectually offset that doubt and 
corrected the evil. While one instrument brought 
myriads of distant worlds into view, the other in- 
strument revealed quite as wonderful a realm in 


1‘Life,” by Smucker, p. 145. 


The Ethical Reign of God 261 


the microscopic world around us, teeming with 
active life quite as real as the life we live, and cared 
for by the same divine power which watches over us. 
These two inventions have compensated each other 
and produced a stabilizing of thought. They have 
let men see that while God is busily engaged in un- 
limited space far beyond the reach of the most power- 
ful telescope, he is at the same time unfailing in his 
watch care over the frailest bird that flies, the tiniest 
flower that blooms, or the minutest coral insect that 
lives unseen in the bosom cf the ocean. No thought 
could be more reassuring to human hearts than this. 
Man walks the earth amid myriads of living things 
which attest God’s tenderest care, and where his con- 
stant power and his unmistakable watch care are 
none the less manifest than is his majestic presence 
in the ponderous worlds and shining spheres that 
people space. “It is wonderful,’ says Thomas 
Chalmers, “that the same God whose presence is 
diffused through immensity, and who spreads the 
ample canopy of his administration over all its 
dwelling places, should with an energy as fresh as 
if he had only begun the work of creation, turn 
himself to the region around us and lavish on its 
every handbreadth all the exuberance of his goodness 
and crown it with every variety of conscious ex- 
istence.”2 However great the wonder, we do not 
suffer our minds to be burdened with the least 
doubt, because we do not question the testimony 
of the two scientific instrutaents, and not least the 
microscope. 


“Astronomical Discourses,” p. 108. American Tract So- 


ciety. 


262 A Gospel for the New Age 


Somewhere in the grand galaxy of creation God 
has given mankind a rightful place, safe in his in- 
finite goodness and sovereign care, there to perform 
some important part in the matchless machinery of 
the universe. 

But this matchless grandeur is seen in what may 
be called a mechanical world where fixed laws 
prevail and scientific certainty is discovered. But 
higher up in the order of existence lies the moral 
world, where ethical conditions are found and human 
life is aglow. Here sin and sorrow are found and life 
is often far from an existence of joy. Here evil is seen 
to triumph and good is often defeated and lost. 
Hence man wants to ask seriously enough, If there 
be a God and his ethical reign is supreme, why does 
evil exist and sin’s confession follow? Is there no 
divine Ruler in the moral world, such as is seen in 
the material realm, to guide and protect man from 
evil? 

SURFACE TURMOILS 

On the surface of the sea of human life there may 
appear only the confusion of the lashing waves of 
sin and sorrow, giving no hint of the great sea 
currents which everywhere exist; but deep down 
beneath the troubled waves of human passion and 
pride there reigns the eternal purpose of God deeply 
fixed in the sovereignty of his love, and no amount 
of human rebellion and strife can bring it to naught. 

It may be said of almost any well-governed country 
that its loyalty is deficient and its patriotism nil. 
Such traits often lie dormant in times of peace, 
since there is no occasion to call forth their display. 
Here, as in the kingdom of God, the duty of every 


The Ethical Reign of God 263 


man is not to grasp and exercise authority over his 
fellow, but to bring his own life into subjection to in- 
herent social laws. All best-governed people are 
those who govern themselves the best. They who 
are wise do not wait for the outward pressure of 
faithful citizens. While evil has its punishment in 
the government of God, the glory of heaven’s Ruler 
in seen best in the righteous life of his earthly sub- 
jects. God cannot compel fidelity in a free soul. 
This would be to override the moral nature of man, 
deprive him of the noble gift of self-determination, 
and destroy the very foundation of liberty and of 
religion. 

Notwithstanding all the wickedness, crime, and 
suffering, God is preéminent in the world and sover- 
eign still. His eye is watchful of human affairs; 
and if a sparrow cannot fall to earth without his 
notice, can it be possible that empires shall rise 
and mankind succeed without his knowledge? Yet 
the question will recur: “If God rules the world, and 
is wise and good, why is there so much of sin and 
suffering?’”’ Could God not have made a world 
where sin is impossible, where there is no suffering 
and sorrow? Are these a necessity in the economy 
of God? 

It is not best for man to be saying what God 
should have done or left undone; his duty is to ad- 
just himself to the world as he finds it and learn to 
know its laws and obey them. 


A PAINLESS WORLD 


In answer to the question, “‘Why did God not 
make a world where pain and suffering are not?” 


264 A Gospel for the New Age 


let us say that this is exactly what God has already 
done. That painless world is all about us—a world 
with which we have to do every day we live. Anda 
marvelous world it is, full of wisdom and beauty, 
manifesting much of the skill of God’s creative 
powers. Life is there at work in all of its order 
and perfection. There we find generation, growth, 
maturity, fruitage, and death—all, but without the 
possibility of a single pain, heartache, or suffering, 
because it is a world without a vestige of a nerve of 
brain. It is that world in which Luther Burbank, 
“the plant wizard,” has accomplished so many of 
his wonderful deeds. This we recognize as the 
“Vegetable Kingdom.’ There God is so marvelous- 
ly manifesting himself in the beauties of the lilies 
and the fragrance of blossoms, in structure of stalk, 
petal, and stamen. He who has not observed the 
marvelous wonders of the plant life has not learned 
the right use of his powers of observation. Surely 
in the plant world God has not failed to write the 
record of his creative intelligence, in a world without 
a single heartache or pain! 

But some one will say: “If God could not have 
made a world with a brain and nerves without pain 
and suffering, could he not have made a world where 
there could have been no sins committed and no 
sorrow felt?” 

A SINLESS WORLD 

Yes, it was possible for God to create a kind of a 
world and make sinning an impossibility; and let 
us remember that he has created exactly this sinless 
world. “O,” you say, “‘that is the world for which I 
sigh. Let me live in a world like that!” Have not 


The Ethical Reign of God 265 


great souls given expression to just this same feeling? 
Did not Thomas Huxley once say, “I declare that if 
some great power were to agree to make me think 
what is always true and do what is right on the con- 
dition of my being made into a kind of a clock and 
wind me up every morning, I would instantly close 
with the bargain’? In closing with that offer what 
would be the consequences? That would indeed 
be a most expensive transaction, for he should have 
to surrender his personality, lose his identity, and 
forfeit his iberty. He would become a mere machine 
and no longer be a man. 

In the sinless world there are affection, mother 
love, enjoyment, eyes to behold the beauties of 
nature, memory, music—in fact, many of the powers 
which bless our human life. But there is no sin, 
because there is no moral intelligence or religious 
instinct. This we know as the “Animal Kingdom.” 
Here there are to be found many of the traits which 
belong to man. Birds have music, animals have a 
low grade of intelligence, and in a limited way some 
of them have wonderful memories. Some dogs and 
wild animals have the instinct of cunning to a sur- 
prising degree, and many of them can be educated to 
a considerable extent. What truer friend has man 
than his “faithful dog,’’ who will leave his own 
species and fight them in defense of his master? 

All this occurs in the sinless world where there is no 
moral responsibility. Your, horse or your dog may 
be vicious and deserve to be slain, but you never 
think of them as being sinful. But this is in the low, 
animal grade of life. 

Now, which of us, in view of the ills to which our 


266 A Gospel for the New Age 


flesh is heir, would surrender the dignity, the gran- 
deur, and the joys of his human station, and step 
down to the unmoral brute life or the nerveless 
plant life in order to escape the possibility of sinning 
or suffering? What misfortune do we lament so 
much as the paralysis of the nervous system or the 
loss of our reasoning powers? Just these two things, 
nerves and reason, constitute the glory of man. 
They make the joy of life possible and existence 
desirable. By them God effects his sensible ap- 
proach to man in blessings of every sort. 

It was not possible, so we deem, to make nerves 
and pleasurable sensation a possibility without 
making pain a possibility in life. Pleasurable sensa- 
tions and pain are carried to the brain by the same 
nervous system. The faculty of great joy carries 
with it the ability to suffer greatly. The soul not 
awake to the deeper sufferings of life is found to be 
also dead to the intense delights of life. The noblest 
souls are the deepest sufferers in mind and body. 
The nerve senses of the body by which we realize 
suffering are but the avenues by which we enjoy all 
of the God-given pleasures of life. The pain we feel 
is often but nature’s warning as we approach dan- 
ger or violate some vital law, and is therefore the 
guardian of life. Here we discover the purpose of 
every pain and every sorrow. There has never been 
a calamity in all history that was not God’s protest 
against the violation somewhere, whether deliberate 
or not, of his infinite plans for human well-being and 
happiness. God has made the way of right most 
beautiful and blessed, though hills are to be climbed 
and battles fought; and there is nothing truer than 


The Ethical Reign of God 267 


the Scripture, “The way of the transgressor is 
hard.” It is far from the truth to hold with Haw- 
thorne, in “‘The Marble Faun,” that sin is necessary 
in the government of God and an essential in the 
development of a great character. To hold to such 
an opinion would be to impeach the wisdom and 
goodness of God our Creator. In our world of moral 
free agency sin and suffering must be a possibility, 
but a necessity never, else the very foundations of 
moral accountability would be gone. 


THREE POSSIBLE CREATIVE SCHEMES 


How could the Creator have made sin an im- 
possibility without destroying the very world rela- 
tions which he had made? There are but three 
conceivable ways of looking at the problem: (1) 
God could have refrained from creating man al- 
together. (2) He might have hedged man about 
with powerful restraints so that he could not desire 
to commit sin. (8) God might have surrounded the 
free soul with such an abundance of such persuasive 
beauty that he would never want to commit sin. 

Would either of these schemes have answered 
God’s purpose in the creation of man and have 
contributed to the further enhancing of the life of 
man? Let us look at them one by one: 

Scheme one. If God had refrained from creating 
man, it would appear that God was afraid to trust 
himself in the creation of such an infinite possibility 
as the soul of man. Then again, if no moral agent 
had ever been created anywhere in the universe, it 
is clear that none could have appeared in the world, 
the highest order of existence could not have been 


268 A Gospel for the New Age 


attained, and the noblest order of being would have 
been wanting. God would have fallen short. 

Scheme two. 'To have hedged man about with 
forceful restraints were to have made him free and 
then denied him the power of exercising his freedom, 
which is a contradiction in fact—the suspension of 
his very nature by destroying his liberty. Could 
there be a moral universe without a dual choice? 
or a free mind with no evil to choose? One would as 
well speak of a thinking mind with nothing to think 
about, or eyes to see and nothing to look at, which 
is nonsense. And yet it is as reasonable as a free 
soul hedged about with forceful restraints so as not 
to commit sin. 

Scheme three. ‘This has no better merit than the 
others. To create a moral world and then govern 
it by such a display of divine influence as to over- 
power and reduce to submission the will of man, 
either by glad or beautiful agencies, so as to defeat 
its willing would be to destroy the personality of 
man. In brief, it would be God’s will and not man’s, 
from which man could not derive any merit. 

This brings us back to the absurdity of the thought 
of a world without any allurements to sin, yet with 
holy beings init. Wills must have motives to actions 
—good motives, bad motives—and the will to act 
must not be taken away, else the deeds when done be- 
come another’s and not our own, in which there can 
be no human merit. 


THE GREAT INQUIRY 


Still the question will recur, Why should an 
all-wise and loving Heavenly Father create a being 


The Ethical Reign of God 269 


capable of choosing evil and place him is a world 
like ours fraught with such far-reaching conse- 
quences? 

The answer lies chiefly in the nature of God him- 
self—in his desire for the voluntary return of his 
love bestowed upon his intelligent, sentient, spiritual 
children. This is love’s great law. Is seeks always 
love returned. We feel that we should love God 
because he first loved us. His love begets this sense 
of obligation. Love must have fellowship and be 
reciprocated or it will die. Thus God created such 
a being as man, having freedom of will and affection, 
upon whom he could lavish his great love, and by 
whom righteous love could be intelligently and 
voluntarily returned. God wants not simple obedi- 
ence and adoration, but a glad, heartfelt affection 
freely given; for with just such love he has loved us. 
It is only when we fail to be swayed by his love and 
fail of love’s beautiful and lofty ideals in life that 
we give place to evil and become sinners in the sight 
of God. Surely it is reasonable to think that such 
a world as ours is infinitely best. A universe eter- 
nally prearranged and mechanically grinding out its 
fixed results, with no possibility for human initiative 
or merit, under the iron laws of invariable necessity, 
could not answer the divine Creator or culminate 
in the soul’s highest ends of voluntary obedience and 
love to the Heavenly Father. The ethics of God’s 
rule is readily seen. In creating free agents it was 
necessary to leave them free in order to secure the 
existence of moral goodness and thereby fulfill the 
grand ends of all creation. In moral freedom lies 


270 A Gospel for the New Age 


the foundation of all righteousness, religious pos- 
sibility, and eternal hopes. 


THE ETHICS OF GOD’S KINGDOM 


It is the profound prerogative of God to maintain 
the ethical integrity of his kingdom always and 
everywhere. God must maintain justice, mercy, 
and love along with human freedom and at the same 
time have supreme regard for the governmental con- 
sistency of his reign. It is not with any one feature 
of God’s nature that man must be satisfied. No 
one of his attributes can be lauded to the neglect of 
another. ‘‘His passion of love would be as little at 
rest as his passion of justice with any dealing which 
did not keep all profound ethical interests amply 
protected.’’* Patient mercy and love are no less 
essential to God’s rule than are justice and truth 
or wisdom and might. In the beginning God es- 
tablished his system of government; and as he is a 
God that changes not, that system is ever the same. 
He governs all things according to the nature he has 
given them. He does not create the free human soul 
and then attempt to govern it by the laws intended 
for material forces. Compelled obedience can never 
be virtuous or holy. In speaking of God’s govern- 
ment of the world, many seem to forget this under- 
lying truth and think of God’s ethical reign in the 
world as if a father would attempt to control his 
child as he does his horse or his automobile. How 
does the Heavenly Father deal with his earthly 
children? Upon exactly the same principle he deals 


3 Productive Beliefs,” L. H. Hough, p. 142. (Fleming H. 
Revell Co.) 


The Ethical Reign of God 271 


with nations as with individuals, and he has the same 
law for the rich as for the poor, and the greatness or 
smallness of the offense does not receive different 
recognition from him. God did not have a law for 
David as king of Israel and a different law for pres- 
ent-day rulers. Men try to persuade us that we 
have outlived the Decalogue and the old foundations 
of equity. 

Men who are indifferent enough toward God in 
ordinary life are frantic enough in their appeals to 
him in times of trouble. When the great World 
War broke out men who had no use for God before 
then were eloquent in their appeals to the Church to 
call upon God in prayer that he would stop the 
dreadful drama in its very beginning and spare 
mankind the consequences of that which they had 
brought upon themselves. Men could see that “all 
wars are an abomination unto the Lord,” but had 
forgotten that all sin stands before him in the same 
pillory as war, as intemperance, as social degeneracy, 
as dishonesty. God would no more strike down the 
great war lords and stop the war than he would have 
stricken down a thief in the act of stealing or any 
other individual for the smallest act of sin. In either 
case he would have resorted to force to coerce a free 
being answerable to God for his own life, and in so 
doing become a violator of his own established laws. 
God has his law of “cause and consequence,” and 
while man cannot control the consequences, he can 
control the cause. If man starts the great ball to 
rolling, he must not be surprised at the damage that 
may be caused. “He that sows must reap,” and the 
late World War was a staggering harvest from sowing 


dal le A Gospel for the New Age 


“dragons’ teeth.” For a quarter of a century the 
world was busily sowing the seeds of war. Noth- 
ing was more evident or easy of proof than this. 
Thoughtful men everywhere recognized the signs of 
the times and sounded the alarm, but no one heeded 
their warning. 

It is a principle of wide acceptance that while 
authority which limits freedom of action may result 
in sloth and intellectual decay, liberty without law 
degenerates into licentiousness.and moral anarchy. 
In the light of this truth see how for decades the 
world went on sowing broadcast the seeds of de- 
struction and for five desperate years did reap the 
fruits of that sowing! 


VON NEITZSCHE’S SUPERMAN 


It would be rather extravagant to hold with some 
that Von Neitzsche was to blame for the horrible 
world conditions leading up to the recent great war. 
Yet his “superman” idea, the “man of iron” 
marching to his goal regardless of consequences to 
the rest of mankind, was back of Germany’s war 
spirit. In it was embodied the doctrine of the 
“survival of the fittest.”” This doctrine was taken 
up by predatory wealth and competitive commerce, 
as best suited to their economic interests in pushing 
their “graft”? to the ends of the earth. The labor 
class hailed it with delight, and nowhere else was the 
“iron-man”’ spirit more defiant. Labor ‘‘struck”’ in 
defiance of the laws of labor unions. This was of 
course the end of all authority and law, yet the 
monster grew till it lifted its head with an ambition 
to encircle the entire globe. Early in the present 


The Ethical Reign of God 273 


century riots were rife in all countries, no less than 
in our beloved America; and many were ready to 
enforce their demands with the emphasis of dynamite. 
Their intention was to terrorize. Lockouts, train 
wrecking, the blowing up of railroad bridges, strikes 
—all that horror such as the world had seldom known 
—became items of daily news. Hastily assembled 
mobs in the street took the reins of government 
into their own hands, and fiendish vengeance pushed 
Rule from the throne of state. In some lands kings 
and rulers were assassinated and justice outraged amid 
mutterings of treason because certain classes did not 
always get their desires gratified. “Rights”? were 
demanded regardless of duties or obligations. 

All this was cutting away the foundations of 
society which exist only upon the basis of mutual 
codperation and fairness. And all those who attack 
law and order do so little dreaming that they are 
tugging at the pillars upon which society rests, and 
are pulling its ruins down upon their own heads as 
certainly as Samson pulled down the temple of Dagon 
in the days of old. 


ALL GERMANY SOWING DRAGONS’ TEETH 


There was a time when all roads led to Germany. 
In art and science, in literature and religion, it was 
thought that no student’s education was complete 
without the touch of a German professor’s hand. 
All the world bowed to German scholarship. 

Yet the most conspicuous “sowing of the seeds of 
war’ to be found in modern history went on in the 
German Empire for the space of forty years, the 
result of which was the dominance of the whole em- 

18 


274. A Gospel for the New Age 


pire by one deadly idea, and that idea was the 
supremacy of Force. Eucken and his followers 
taught that the ‘‘ultimate reality was Spirit and 
Germany was the chief bearer of that Spirit, therefore 
Germany was the destined ruler of the world.” By 
whatever process she might attain the mastery, she 
was but coming to where she might impress the ulti- 
mate reality upon mankind. Bernhardi believed 
that “the ultimate reality was force, and therefore 
might is supreme, and Germany should rule the 
world because she is able.”” World-renowned teach- 
ers of ethics preached that the “will of the empire 
was the highest law’’—that the law of love and 
sacrifice as embodied in the Golden Rule applied 
only to individuals, that the law of the State was 
the law of might—the bloody law of the jungle. All 
small States must succumb to the great State. 

Thus all lines of teaching converged to support the 
program of world conquest. To this end the Empire 
was put upon the strongest possible war basis. Her 
armies and navies were brought to the highest pos- 
sible state of preparedness that science could suggest. 
The spirit of the mighty “‘war lords” brooded over 
the nation till the most fanatical of the people came 
to long for “Der Tag’’—the day when the mighty 
conquest should begin—confidently believing that 
in all the vast national preparation there was mani- 
fest the hand of the “good old Teutonic war god, 
Thor,’’ who was raising up their nation to rule the 
world by her kultur.‘ 


‘The Jung-Deutschland (the journal of the class of young 
Germans corresponding to our Boy Scouts) for October, 1913, 
has this statement: ‘War is the holiest and noblest expression 


The Ethical Reign of God 275 


Henri Bergson described the German thought as 
it came to exist in 1914: “Her ambition looked for- 
ward to the dominance of the world. Moreover, 
there was no moral restraint which could keep this 
ambition under control. Intoxicated by victory and 
the prestige which victory had given her and of 
which her commence, her industry, her science 
even, had reaped the benefit, Germany plunged into 
a material prosperity such as she had never known 
or had ever dreamed of. She told herself that if 
force had wrought this miracle, if force had given 
her these riches and honor, it was because force had 
within it a hidden virtue, mysterious—nay, even 
divine. Yes, even brute force, with all its train of 
trickery and lies, when it comes with power of attack 
sufficient for the conquest of the world, must needs 
have behind it divine direction and be a revelation 
of the will of God. The people to whom this power 
of attack has come were the elect of God, a chosen 
race by whose side other races are but bondsmen. 
To such a race nothing is forbidden that might help 
it to establish its dominion. Let none speak of 
‘inviolable rights.’ Right is what is written in the 
treaty; and the treaty is that which registers the 
will of the conqueror—which is the direction of his 
force for the time being. ‘Force’ then and ‘right’ are 


of human activity.’”’ Bernhardi, in his “‘The Kultur-Idea and 
the State,” has this to say: ‘‘ Between the States there is only 
one course of right—the right of the strongest. It is yoinorns 
reasonable that wars should arise between States. 

It is impossible that the State should commit crime. . . 
Not all the treaties in the world can alter the fact that the 
weaker is always prey to the stronger. . . . The lesser 
State must give way to the stronger.” 


276 A Gospel for the New Age 


the same things; and if force is pleased to take a new 
direction, the old ‘right’ becomes ancient history, 
and the treaty which backs it with solemn under- 
standing becomes no more than a scrap of paper.” 


THE RELIGIOUS BREAKDOWN 


The most alarming event of a few decades back 
was the breakdown of the authority of religion in 
the lands where the great war. took its rise. The 
State came to dominate the schools and colleges as 
well as the pulpits. Teachers and preachers were 
employed, not because they were righteous and 
sound-minded and declared the truth, but because 
they were in accord with the ruling class, and 
taught not the laws of God, but the code of the Em- 
pire. Men of position and honor publicly boasted 
of their “free thinking’’ and came to ridicule the 
teachings of Christ. Bernhardi publicly declared that 
“the Reformation of Luther’s time had kept the 
Empire back a thousand years, by softening the 
people.” 

TRUTH WILL OUT 

Since “truth crushed to earth will rise again,” 
doubtless the time is not far off when it will be 
generally known that the crowned heads of the 
Triple Empire, seeing the gathering storm of social 
discontent which threatened the overthrow of the 
thrones of all Europe, resorted to “‘that last trick of 
tottering dynasties’? and proclaimed a war which 
they did not want, hoping thereby to rid their realms 
of the disturbing element and in the possible suc- 
cess of the war stabilize their tottering thrones. But 
for the coming on of the war, the ‘Red Terror,” 


The Ethical Reign of God 277 


which was with difficulty held in check after the 
signing of the armistice and the Treaty of Versailles, 
would doubtless have swept over all Europe as it did 
Russia, and have menaced all the civilized world. 

During those decades of social and political dis- 
content and the coming into self-consciousness of 
world-wide democracy men spoke of feeling as if 
the end of the world were at hand, and every one 
seemed eager to rush upon the stage and enact his 
part of the great drama before the curtains were 
finally rung down. Science was doing its utmost in 
the production of death-dealing instruments and 
materials, as if the taking of human life were the 
highest achievement. All Europe became a vast 
military camp. The great Powers were armed to the 
teeth under the delusion that “preparedness is the 
prevention of war.’ But the war lords were eager 
for an opportunity to display their prowess and 
hailed the day of action with delight. When at 
length the spark was applied to the mass of highly 
inflammable materials, what a cyclone of fury and 
flame burst upon the helpless world! For fifty-two 
months its fiery billows hissed and roared and swept 
through the nations, as if Satan himself were at 
large among mankind. 

Now that the gruesome garnering goes on, what 
appalling figures sum up the totals! Nearly thirty 
millions of lives were lost, due directly or indirectly 
to the war. Three hundred billion dollars worth of 
property was destroyed. The national debts of the 
world went from forty billions to two hundred and 
fifty billions—five hundred per cent increase. Paper 
money was increased from five to fifty-six billions, 


278 A Gospel for the New Age 


while the gold reserve dwindled from seventy-five 
per cent to twelve. Many of the nations engaged 
in the ghastly conflict were left hopelessly bankrupt 
with their people starving—and the end is not yet. 
But the saddest phase of it all was the fact that of 
the many nations engaged in the war, all but three— 
Turkey, China, and Japan—were Christian nations, 
representing all branches of the Christian Church, 
but all forgetting that ‘‘God is not mocked” and 
bitterly reaping what they had sowed, reaping the 
whirlwind from having sown to the wind. 


HAD Gop LOST CONTROL? 


Now, what shall we say of all this tragedy which 
one would gladly wipe from memory’s tablet if he 
could? In the terrible times of death and destruction 
men who had no use for God in the days of their 
prosperity lifted up their voices in pleading to the 
all-powerful God to stop the war, to save their 
wealth, and to spare their dear sons. The Church 
was frantically appealed to; and because the war 
went on men were clamorous in their verdict that 
“the Church is a failure,” that “‘there is no God,” 
or, if he exists at all, he has lost control of the affairs 
of the world. Even true and faithful Christians were 
greatly disturbed over the attitude of God toward 
the troubled hearts and sorrowing nations. But 
after time for calm deliberation what shall we say? 
Had God forgotten the world, or did he put his hand 
over his face and shut out the view of so terrible a 
tragedy? 

But was not God in the midst of it all? Was his 


“In His Image,” Bryan, p.234. (Fleming H. Revell Co.) 


The Ethical Reign of God 279 


presence not realized by the heroes and trenchmen as 
never before in all their lives? Was not the hand of 
God plainly visible in the uprising of the many 
nations of earth: to put down, at whatever cost, 
the nations holding those fiendish doctrines, that 
“might makes right,” that “Christianity is the 
greatest blasphemy of all time, enchaining and 
softening men,’ that the Golden Rule expressing 
itself in modern democracy is ‘“‘herd morality, fit 
only for women and Englishmen,” and that sacred 
treaties between nations become at times “mere 
scraps of paper’? Was not the hand of God equally 
as visible in putting down any nation or nations 
who could treat an unoffending neighbor as Belgium 
and her women and children were treated—that foul 
blot on the pages of human history which time can 
never erase? If such a nation were allowed to prosper 
and become able to accomplish her ambition of 
world dominance, then indeed might the question 
be asked, “Is there no God in the heavens, and none 
to rule in righteousness in the earth?” 

Was not the ethical rule of God in the world and 
his sovereignty over a world of moral accountability 
vastly more evident in allowing the law of conse- 
quences—sowing and reaping—to work itself out 
than it would have been in having arrested the 
freedom of men, of individuals and nations, and 
reduced them to mere unmoral automatons? All 
sins are an abomination to God, hence the blight 
and suffering of them all. The World War was not 
of God’s making. It was all man’s designing. The 
seeds were deliberately sown by evil men, and the 
results were, as all war’s results have always been, 


280 A Gospel for the New Age 


deeply destructive, deluging the world with blood, 
sorrow, and tears. Men want to hold God to account 
for it all, for allowing such to occur. But all wars 
are of human origin, and all suffering and sorrow 
grow out of the relation which man as a free being 
sustains to the universe. Man may forget this, 
but God still reigns. 


Careless seems the great Avenger. 
History’s pages but afford 

One death grapple in the darkness 
*T wixt old systems and his Word 

Truth forever on the scaffold, 
Wrong forever on the throne; 

Yet that scaffold sways the future, 
And behind the dim unknown 

Standeth God within the shadow, 
Keeping watch above his own. 


THE POISE OF FIXED PRINCIPLE 


Holding this opinion on so stupendous a question 
may be deemed considering lightly the darkest 
tragedy that the world has ever experienced. Is it 
not a poise out of proportion to the gravity of the 
question? Such a view of the great question is not 
the poise of indifference, indicating a lack of knowl- 
edge, and therefore a lack of appreciation of the 
enormity of the subject. The poise assumed is that 
of fixed principle on the part of God in dealing with 
the affairs of life, however great they may be. It 
would have been folly to have expected the Almighty 
God to suspend a fundamental and universal law 
which has been in effect since time began or arrest 
its results all because men in their madness amassed 
the inflammable materials and a single individual 


The Ethical Reign of God 281 


applied the spark and started a conflagration which 
got beyond all control. Men know the laws of 
combustion, even in the realm of national politics; 
but they do not always regard the law of conse- 
quences. They toy with fire and get burned, then 
want God miraculously to stop the pain and heal the 
blisters. It is common at such times to hear men 
appeal to the omnipotence of God. They say: “Is 
not God omnipotent? If so, then why does he not 
stop the calamity?” 

The omnipotence of God must not be interpreted 
so as to destroy his ethical reign in the world or do 
away with the moral nature of man. God cannot do 
that which is contrary to the laws of his own being 
or involve him in self-contradictions. ‘The laws of 
nature are the laws of God,” so that by recognizing 
these as they are and conforming to them we are 
in harmony with God’s plan for human life. The 
magnitude of the calamity must not be allowed to 
sweep us off our feet and lead us to think that, be- 
cause of the vastness of the catastrophe, God would 
become alarmed and conclude to reverse one of his 
fundamental laws—the law of consequences—and 
prevent the frightful harvest. If such were to be the 
ways of God, what would be left us as a basis of 
eternal verity upon which ,to stand and reckon for 
all the future? What would be the ultimate moral 
consequences if such were to happen and men feel 
that God had established so precarious a precedent? 
As nature now stands, with God’s laws fixed and sure, 
we see how defiant evil is on every hand; but let 
men once think that even God had weakened and his 
administration of earthly affairs had failed, how the 


282 A Gospel for the New Age 


evildoers would have rushed out—as they always do 
when the voice of law is hushed—to work their ruin 
and glut their greed! What a bedlam of chaos and 
iniquity this world would become! Life would be one 
prolonged nightmare of anarchy and dread con- 
sternation, a veritable hades on earth! 

What therefore might at first thought have 
seemed to imply that the Heavenly Ruler had 
abandoned his control of the world and turned it 
over to evil agencies comes to be recognized as the 
strongest evidence of the reality of his ethical reign 
in the world. He had neither abandoned his throne 
in the heavens nor adopted a new code of laws in the 
earth, but maintained that which had been in ex- 
istence from the beginning. On this solid rock we 
can all stand and build our hopes for all the future. 

Sin’s consequences always carry with them a bitter 
cup of sorrow and suffering for the innocent. This 
was the foulest blot on the history of the World War 
—the curse of Cain on the brow of the age which the 
future can never forget. But when has there ever 
been race advancement without the toll of human 
sacrifice and the suffering of the innocent? This has 
always been the bitter accident of human progress. 

Yet the time is not far distant when men shall 
come to think that, while the cost of the Great War 
was fearful, the end achieved will in a measure 
compensate for the price paid. If the dreadful plow- 
share which overturned the world prepared the 
nations for a richer harvest in noble human existence, 
if out of it all there shall come a world-wide enlarge- 
ment of life and liberty—when the reign of the 
superman shall be forever put down, and the iron 


The Ethical Reign of God 283 


tread of Might over Right banished from earth, and 
there shall come a new conscience for the rich, when 
the laboring class shall receive more adequately of 
the fruits of their toil, and the bond of brotherhood 
reach across national and racial lines and gird the 
whole earth—then it will be thought that those who 
suffered the greatest heart anguish, as well as those 
who sleep in Flanders’ fields, did not give their life 
wholly in vain. 

Now that the stupendous tragedy is past and 
vast numbers have dropped back into their ac- 
customed channels of petty strife, let us hope that 
never while time lasts will any nation defy the 
sovereignty of God or try to reverse the eternal law 
of cause and effect, or forget that above all empires 
or mighty war lords there stands the High Tribunal 
of humanity before which men and nations shall 
ultimately stand, nor forget that there is a religion 
of God binding all men in a common bond of fellow- 
ship. To forget these things is but to court the fury 
of fate and defy the vengeance of Jehovah. The 
world cannot many times afford the cost of such 
bitter lessons from experience. 





CHAPTER XIIT 


THE MORALE OF THE DYNAMIC RELIGION 


‘‘The gospel is not only reasonable; it is dynamic. And the 
sinless risen Lord is the concrete embodiment of the realities 
it contains. Without him as a real person in history, belief 
in the consonance of the spiritual life with the natural order 
and confidence in its supremacy to that order, would be buta 
justifiable hope and a working hypothesis. Possessed of him, 
this belief becomes a faith that will remove mountains.”’— 
“The Gospel and the Modern Man,” Shailer Mathews (The 
Macmillan Co). 


CHAPTER XIII 
THE MORALE OF THE DYNAMIC RELIGION 


WHAT is there about the religion of the Lord Jesus 
Christ that gives to his true followers their splendid 
morale? Furthermore, why are they, in the matter 
of the uplift of humanity, the most optimistic people 
in the world? It can plainly be seen why a merchant 
is enthusiastic in the sale of his wares or a land 
dealer in the sale of his lands. With them it is the 
promise of gain, the lure of wealth; but with the 
Christian it is often much work and little pay. He 
thinks of the welfare of others, not of himself. With 
high hopes and patient soul he spends his life when 
often, like his Lord, he has not where to lay his head. 
Talented, masterful men and brilliant, accomplished 
women have done this in all ages of Christianity 
and are doing so to-day. Why are they willing to 
make such a noble sacrifice? 

It will not suffice simply to say that such Christians 
have caught the “enthusiasm of humanity” or that 
they have a vision of the ‘‘universal brotherhood of 
man” and are following'that gleam. Theirs is a 
veritable passion for Christ, and their spirit cannot 
otherwise be explained. 

With Christianity’s underlying principles and her 
wonderful experience, is it not to be expected that 
some distinctive and superior morale should be 
manifested by her subjects? If as an institution 
Christianity were not different or better than other 


(287) 


288 A Gospel for the New Age 


religions, what claim would there be for its ex- 
istence? Why cumbereth it the ground? Its right 
to existence is shown by fruits in the form of a 
superior Christian character. When our Lord said: 
“Tf you love them which love you, what thank have 
ye? for sinners also love those that love them,” 
did he not indicate the chief feature of the morale 
of the kingdom—namely, that superior trait which 
alone would claim the confidence of mankind and 
dare make the demands necessary to make it a 
dominant force in the world? For the great tasks of 
the kingdom he knew that no ordinary investment 
must be made and only the noblest of character 
employed. In making this demand Christianity 
must demonstrate its worth by supplying that 
strength and grace which mankind needs and God 
wants to give us. In its intrinsic nature Christianity 
is based upon the principle of love, whose first work 
is to enrich and then commission. 


CHRISTIAN OPTIMISM 


In analyzing the morale of Christianity the first 
element which arrests attention is its splendid 
optimism, the enthusiasm with which great tasks 
are attempted, and the persistence with which they 
are accomplished. No man possesses a more healthy 
enthusiasm than does the follower of our Jesus 
Christ. He is no “reed shaken by the wind.” His 
is the spirit of the Master, the product of faith, and 
an exponent of his religion when rightly realized. 
The Christian man is logically an enthusiast; he 
could not well be otherwise. To him life is sweet; 
the present is joyous and the future radiant with 


The Morale of the Dynamic Religion 289 


abundant promise. Then what is more natural than 
that he should be an optimist in religion, since the 
very foundations of hope are his? 

That man is the master of his own life and the 
maker of his character is the foundation upon which 
all our moral world system stands. This fact 
applied gives eoloring to the proverb that ‘‘the 
world is what we make it,” good or bad. We see 
this fact demonstrated daily. If, then, the future, 
which is often foreboding to others, seems radiant 
to a brave-hearted Christian, must his judgment be 
discounted and his vision deemed a delusion? The 
spirit of the man makes the difference. That which 
is in reality dark to some is not so to him, because 
his point of view brings the best to view at all times 
and makes the future bright and beautiful. His 
manner of approaching men wins him friends, and 
his method of dealing with difficulties resolves the 
combination and the problem disappears. He 
fulfills the conditions which make for a great future, 
and his trust in God makes success a certainty. He 
himself being a “‘success’”’ and the architect of his 
own fate, he wins out where others too often fail. 

There is deep philosophy in all this. This real 
Christian is in the atmosphere of harmony. He is 
at peace with God, with his neighbor, and with him- 
self, hence he lives a harmonious life and looks out 
upon life correctly. He has his struggles, but they 
develop character and lead to victory. He may have 
his trials, as do others, but he knows that without 
these character is impossible. So there are no dis- 
cords in his life. He is in right relations with life 
and in tune with all things. Into such a relation the 

19 


290 A Gospel for the New Age 


Christian man came at the time of his new birth. 
Before that epochal event he felt that every element 
of his being was somehow out of order and something 
was wrong; for sin is always discordant, while 
righteousness is harmonious. His tastes were in a 
measure vicious, his ambitions bred forebodings, 
his paths were hidden, he suspected men, distrusted 
God, and had a dash of pessimism in his own soul. 
All this of course was due, not to a prearranged and 
fatalistic purpose in life all about him, but to the 
false attitude and character of the man. He made 
life what he found it to appear, and to his biased 
vision the future was dark and life a seeming mistake. 
Such a soul wages a losing warfare not only against 
the better interests of life, but against God himself. 
To him the future is justly fraught with gloom; it 
could not well be otherwise. 

The Christian’s optimistic view of life is eminently 
a correct one. This is God’s world, and he made it 
according to his infinite wisdom. He intended this 
life to be desirable and sweet. To the eye that can 
behold it beauty is aglow everywhere in the world. 
There is music in abundance for every soul attuned 
to life’s great melody. When our Saviour redeemed 
the soul he did not intend that evil should continue 
to dominate it and blight all its hopes. God did not 
create the world in a fit of displeasure, nor did he 
make beauty to adorn disgrace, nor the fruits of 
earth to pamper debauchery or to foster drunken- 
ness. Nor did he intend that wealth should become 
a power to trample down the poor and helpless. 
God’s idea of life is neither a carnival of lust nor a 
banquet of luxury. Both the present and the future 


The Morale of the Dynamic Religion 291 


belong to God, and his children would do him dis- 
honor not to trust his wisdom and be optimistic; 
therefore hopefulness is the right attitude of every 
child of God. When the Christian let God into his 
soul, in came also all that was radiant and beautiful, 
and his life was filled with the glory of God’s in- 
finite goodness and love. What else then could he 
be but optimistic, and what could his future be but 
bright with the promise of all that is intrinsically 
worth while? Such a view of life is no delusion 
growing out of a figment of fancy, but a rich reality 
of being. 


Jesus the Prince of Optimists 


The Scriptures everywhere present Christ as the 
“‘hope of the world.” Since the Bible is the world’s 
textbook of hope, joy, and love, setting forth these 
traits in great fullness, so Jesus, as the fulfillment of 
the Scriptures, is everywhere painted as the Prince of 
Optimists. He was himself the embodiment of his 
own teachings, and religious optimism was the morale 
of his great life, prominent at all times and under 
all cireumstances. In making a brief of the facts 
of his teachings one must write down the following: 
Beauty of repentance, Heroism in the struggle for 
righteousness, Joy in sins forgiven, Triumph in attain- 
ing nobleness of character, Victory over the world, 
A passion for God, and The hope of everlasting life! 
These invest life always with an unsurpassed halo, 
yet they are the fruit of religion as Jesus taught it. 
They illumine life with undying splendor and beauty. 
The very mention of such things stirs the soul of 
the faithful Christian as the bugle call stirs the heart 


292 A Gospel for the New Age 


of an old soldier. Their echo tingles like music in 
his soul. ; 

While some have called Christ a dreamer, every 
one must admit that under all circumstances he 
was an optimist of the first rank. Every life must 
be weighed in the light of the times and the difficulties 
overcome. He was born of humble parentage; as 
a prophet he depended upon alms; during his active 
ministry he had not where to lay his head. But 
the barrenness of life did not embitter his character. 
““A sweet contentment of soul ever possessed him, 
and he was as a child in his Father’s house.” He 
never lost control of himself nor became the slave 
of circumstances. His highest gift to his disciples 
was a “banquet of peace.’ Notwithstanding the 
fact that he knew that the end was near and his 
betrayer was present, the atmosphere of the Upper 
Room was surcharged with joy. So uplifted was he 
amid the turmoils of the mockery of a trial that 
Pilate was amazed. Even while hanging upon the 
Cross he showed no resentment, but prayed for his 
persecutors and made provision for the care of his 
bereft mother. Nothing embitters ordinary men 
like utter poverty and social injustice, yet Jesus bore 
them with radiance of soul. In the shadow of the 
cross, waiting for his crucifixion, he is strangely 
confident of success. ‘“‘My kingdom is not of this 
world, else my disciples would resort to the sword.” 
In the gloom of that cyclone of horrors which awaited 
him .and the trial of his disciples’ faith, he said to 
them: ‘‘ Ye believe in God, believe also in me’’—as 
he who shall accomplish redemption and reveal im- 
mortality—believe in me and wait results! 


The Morale of the Dynamic Religion 293 


Pagan poets have placed the “golden age”’ in the 
far distant past; it was the glory of Isaiah to imagine 
a kingdom which would be established by outward 
sanction of authority; but it was the achievement of 
Jesus to set up the kingdom of heaven within the 
heart with the eternal sanction of love. “He was 
the first to assert that the only bondage a man needs 
to fear is sin; that no man needs be a slave to sin 
unless he himself so wills; that freedom from sin is 
perfect liberty; and that every one could enter 
heaven by retiring into a calm and loving soul.’”! 

The highest reach of optimism hitherto had dared 
to conceive only of a state of physical comfort and 
placed that far away; but Jesus proclaimed a king- 
dom of holiness at hand—‘“ The kingdom of heaven 
is within you’’—and he dared to proclaim this 
“‘sood news”? when the Jewish rule was a hollow 
mockery and the pagan world a seething mass of 
corruption. In the light of calculating reason all 
this was the very extravagance of optimism, this 
forecast of Christianity’s vitality and achievement. 


A LIFE WITH A FUTURE 


Of all men the Christian man has a future. This 
was most characteristic of Christ. In all his teach- 
ings nothing was more evident or beautiful than his 
faith in the future of his kingdom. He believed in 
his Heavenly Father, in himself, and in the future of 
the human family. In a dark hour he said to his 
disciples: “‘ Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s 
good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” And in the 


1“'The Mind of the Master,’ John Watson. (George H. 
Doran Co.) 


294 A Gospel for the New Age 


very atmosphere of the cross on which he had just 
been crucified he said: “Go ye into all the world, 
and preach the gospel to every creature.’’ Could a 
faith in the future be more sublime? 

That soul which has no future toward which he 
turns, in which he lives and in whose radiant light 
he walks, is dead even while he lives. But Christ 
was not dead, and down to the present his heroes 
have never been dead, and they never will be. To 
the buoyant, healthful soul, with a faith all aglow 
with the instincts of immortality, what is so sweet 
as the dawn of each new day and each new era in 
the world’s history? To such a soul the past may 
seem dull and the present irksome, but the future 
ever thrills with joyous hope. We turn from the 
thoughts of a fruitless day to revel in the delights 
of a rosy-tinted twilight, knowing it to be a promise 
of a fair to-morrow toward which we are borne on the 
wings of sweet slumber. In that fair to-morrow, 
unseen though it be, no sorrow ever comes, no 
friendship ever fails. We people that land with the 
folk of our fancy, and we exclude the untrue, the 
unkind, and the angular. What treasures are there 
for all—homes for the homeless, health for the 
sickly, plenty for the poor! There we meet no 
frowns nor deal with the commonplace world of 
to-day. 

This is not all daydream. God has planted deep 
in human nature the spirit of optimism. By day 
and by night the toilers of this task-ridden world find 
time to glide out past golden piers to hoist silken 
sails and float on fancy’s sea with never a cloud in 
her sky or a storm to ruffle her serene bosom, there 


The Morale of the Dynamic Religion 295 


to dream of a fair existence hedged about by fancy’s 
curtains from the rude touch of the real. How 
blessed this privilege of liberating oneself from the 
turmoils of the day and, with anticipating hands, 
plucking flowers from the garden of the future, 
fresh, sweet, and beautiful! Earth has no purer 
joy than this nor humanity a surer evidence of 
native greatness. It is this element in the Christian 
man’s life that makes him different from others. 

In pronouncing a eulogy over the body of his 
brother lying in his casket, Robert G. Ingersoll 
said: “‘Life is a narrow vale ’twixt the cold and 
barren peaks of two eternities’—which may have 
seemed true to him. For if the past lent no fragrance 
of sweet memories, surely the future held but little 
balm fer his broken heart, unbeliever that he was. 
Yet in his very next breath he said: ‘‘Hope sees a 
star in the night, and listening love hears the rustle 
of wings in the air.’””’ What love and hope? It is 
only the Christian’s hope that sees in the twinkle 
of the stars in the night the jeweled finger prints of 
God’s watch care. 

If, as some men say, “all progress is divine,” 
may we not read in this instinct of futurity in the 
morale of the Christian ‘the very impulse of God 
himself leading us on to the better things in store? 
Surely such a life of hopefulness is in accord with the 
gracious will of God. He who has planned will surely 
lead us on to the waiting harvest time where fruitage 
abounds. 

EVIL WITHOUT A FUTURE 

While righteousness, using gold and precious stone, 

builds upon the rock to abide, evil builds upon the 


296 A Gospel for the New Age 


sand, to endure but for a season and go down in the 
storms. In its very nature sin is a predatory and 
destructive fact which begets strife and ends in 
suicide. Its fundamental principle is_ selfishness, 
the one disintegrating force in the universe and the 
constant cause of discord. Its symbol is the mother 
eagle who snatched the sacrifice from the altar and 
bore it to her hungry nestlings, to find a little later 
her nest in flames which consumed her young while 
she swooped and screamed about the flaming pyre 
in terror. A live coal from the altar had adhered to 
the flesh and set her nest on fire. Such is the fa- 
tality of evil. It may defy laws and for a while 
override justice, but its doom is sure. It is remark- 
able to what extent this fact has been found true 
in the history of individuals and nations of late. 
No principle of science could have been more thor- 
oughly established. The struggle has often been 
fierce and long, with evil deeply intrenched in human 
depravity, backed by long-standing precedent and 
fortified by millions of money; but as God lived the 
end came, as it should! Beneath the focused rays 
of withering truth evil could not continue the 
hopeless strife. Evil’s future is never bright; its 
votaries are never optimistic, and its feats are never 
heroic. Its principles bring forth despair, not hope. 
All the enforced enthusiasm or pretended science 
imaginable could not have made the American 
liquor traffic justifiable or given permanence to the 
militarist’s dream of world dominance. Such things 
are contrary to the divine plans. The sea currents 
of life are against them; hence all seeming progress 
is a constant struggle against fate. But not so with 


The Morale of the Dynamic Religion 297 


the Christian man, and it can easily be seen why he 
is optimistic. He has not to fight against nature’s 
winds, but to sail joyfully with them. 

Compared with the empty struggles of ambition 
for individual supremacy, how splendid are the 
achievements of the heroes of the Cross? Their 
motives are of the highest. In the gift of themselves 
for the uplift of humanity, self is forgotten in the 
glow of coming victory seen from afar. They die; 
but the tomb of each hero is a stepping-stone to a 
larger, freer life. What could be finer than the 
morale of the soldiers of the Cross on the firing line 
of the world’s vanguard? With the promise of 
victory in the distance, they swerve not and are 
never surer of a triumph than when the sky is 
darkest or the battle waging hottest. In it all, like 
the great apostle, they “thank God and take courage.”’ 

It is just this spirit that made heroes of the young 
believers at Pentecost and enabled them to stem the 
popular fury and espouse a cause destined to lift 
mankind to a higher plane of religious thinking and 
living. This same spirit aglow in the soul of the 
martyrs enabled the aged Hugh Latimer to say to 
his companion at the stake as the flames gathered 
about them: “Be brave, Brother Ridley, and play 
the man. We shall light a candle in England to-day 
which the ages shall never put out.”” And they did. 
From that time forth the fires of persecution died 
down and were never again rekindled. 


LIFE WITH A DEFINITE PROGRAM 


The high morale of Christianity is due, as much as 
to anything else, to the splendid task set before the 


298 A Gospel for the New Age 


Christian. Every great cause must have a great 
ideal as the source of inspiration and center of action. 
Only with a righteous cause can the world’s best be 
accomplished. Before the Christian is set the highest 
and noblest of tasks, and with the enthusiasm born 
of faith and love he bends himself to the great ac- 
complishment which holds him true to his best en- 
deavor. Where is there a more inspiring task in 
which to invest one’s life? Men everywhere seem 
fascinated by the charms of worldly, selfish pur- 
suits; but when sifted down, where is the abiding 
value? What ultimate worth can there be in the 
ceaseless round of pleasure seeking or money get- 
ting, forever marking time but getting nowhere? 
Men speak of the fascination of accumulating a 
fortune and call the amassing of wealth ‘‘a great 
game’’; but when the only ideal is just to be rich, 
forgetful of the world’s crying needs while enjoying 
the personal glory of being ‘‘one of the world’s 
millionaires,” the high enthusiam completely dis- 
appears. Such a life is rapidly coming to be looked 
upon with merited disfavor. Such wealth is too 
often not only a source of political corruption, but 
an actual menace to society, endangering the very 
foundations of our national life. 

Our Saviour pointed out very clearly the dangers 
of riches to those who trust in them, which include 
the loss of the finer sensibilities, the acquiring of 
a Shylock character, and the hanging of useless 
wealth like a millstone about the neck of the rich. 
What glory can there be in the ceaseless grind in 
making more money to buy more stocks to make 
more money, and so on ad infinitum? What great 


The Morale of the Dynamic Religion 299 


thought can there be in such a life, what inspiration, 
what heroism? Of such a pursuit the great Teacher 
once said: “‘Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be 
required of thee: then whose shall those things be?” 
But when wealth is sought and used as a means of 
human betterment in public benefits and social 
redemption, then it is that the possessor becomes not 
a society wrecker, but indeed a ‘world builder!” 

Christianity inspires the finest spirit because it is 
a religion with a splendid purpose and a definite 
program. Its Founder himself was the embodiment 
of just this spirit. With no great organization to 
which he could look, no array of bayonets or big 
bank account back of him, but with only the faith- 
ful eleven about him, he issued his great commission, 
“Go ye into all the world,” thus looking to the far 
future and incomparable task of a conquest of the 
world. Where in all the history of endeavor is there 
finer than this? With such a program and leadership 
as his, what wonder that the untried apostles became 
heroes of the first rank, to the subversion of empires 
and the overthrow of strongholds. Theirs was a 
sword which spilled no blood while safeguarding the 
rights of men. Theirs is the matchless morale of 
love; theirs the victory of peace. What age or nation 
can resist such a force when wisely applied? Always 
such a soldiery gains the confidence of mankind and 
finds the winds of heaven in its favor. Such a 
triumph is not the result of haphazard nor the fruit 
of chance, but the result of a definite program and 
persistent purpose. 


300 A Gospel for the New Age 


TEE TASK TO BE ACCOMPLISHED 


The task to be accomplished is to make world- 
wide the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ—the re- 
demption of human character. ‘There is a growing 
conviction,” says Cuthburt Hall, ‘‘that the religion 
of Christ has about it a central element which con- 
stitutes the very essence of religion. This is not to 
be discovered by reducing it to its final residuum, 
but by taking it as a whole. The fullness of the 
Godhead is in it; the unspeakable gift of God, the 
depth of the riches of divine grace, the treasures of 
wisdom and knowledge, the depths and heights and 
breadth and length of love are all there. The grow- 
ing appreciation of the Biblical content and the 
broadening scope of Christian experience are dis- 
closing the vast proportions of these universal and 
permanent elements of Christian religion.’”? To 
realize the worth of such a religion and to bring all 
the world to do the same is the program set before 
the followers of our Lord, and such a task is sufficient 
to win the most heroic attachment. 

By the compelling power of his love Christ’s 
followers have gone on working year in and year 
out, often with little or no apparent results, but 
upheld and inspired by a lofty sense of duty and by 
their faith in a God of love, who in his own good 
time will send the harvest. This faith alone enables 
men to face with calm courage the stupendous 
difficulties which lie across their pathway and tri- 
umph in spite of them all. 

Ours is a gospel which makes heroic demands upon 


«Universal Element of the Christian Religion,’”’ p. 126. 
(Fleming H. Revell Co.) 


The Morale of the Dynamic Religion 301 


us. To be faithful to this demand requires the aban- 
don of a true soldier. All self must be forgotten 
and only the great task remembered. In spite of 
the ease-loving streak in human nature, it is the 
difficult which charms, the great deeds that catch 
the attention of men. Christianity has at its very 
heart the principle of sacrifice, and that means the 
gift of self—it may mean death. Recent events have ~ 
shown that the Cross still has its ancient appeal when 
it is given the right of way. The response to the 
call for recruits to defend our precious heritage of 
liberty in the World War has taught the Church an 
immortal lesson in its approach to men. It is the 
difficult task that charms; to soften and cheapen 
Christianity is to kill it. That young Chinaman who 
said that he “preferred Christianity to Buddhism, 
because it is easier; for to be a true Buddhist one has 
to study,” laid bare, like a flash of lightning in the 
darkness, an imminent peril to Christianity—su- 
perficiality, the substitution of cheapness for reality 
and spiritual worth. The history of triumphant 
Christianity is the story of true heroism; and as long 
as this continues our religion will take the world. 
But abandon the difficult and heroic and her banners 
will droop and the fires of heraldry go out on the 
hilltops of life. Only a heroic Christianity can save 
this self-indulgent chaotic age, surrounded by its 
mountains of difficulties. 

The heroic is the law of spiritual life. When the 
rich young ruler came to our Lord asking, ‘ What 
shall I do to inherit eternal life?” it seemed dis- 
tressing to tell him to “Go, sell, . . . and give to 
the poor; and come, follow me’’; but our Lord knew 


802 A Gospel for the New Age 


what was best for him, and he also knew the laws of 
spiritual life. We give that we may be enriched; my 
lamp never dimmed by lighting another’s; we “keep 
our secret”? by imparting it to others; we die to the 
world that we may live unto God. By just this 
seeming paradox the kingdom of heaven is es- 
tablished. 

“The gospel is greater because it is not ours ex- 
clusively. It is the larger and more precious because 
of the wider ownership. Ours is not only a joint 
ownership with men, but a copartnership with God, 
in the sense that we are coworkers with him.” As 
all real converts to Christ have realized, the first 
impulse of the forgiven soul is to tell the good news 
to some one else and have him to participate in the 
same joy. This is the instinctive obligation of love. 
Failing to impart our religion to others, it withers 
like famished flowers in our grasp. The world-wide 
proclamation of the great truth not only fulfills the 
great command, but it enriches the soul with the 
greatest joy. These two facts, duty done and rejoicing, 
go hand in hand in accomplishing the program of 
Christ. 

The world has lost interest in a religion merely of 
individual salvation. It is too narrow and selfish 
and lacks the altruism of Jesus. All self-centered 
religion soon reaches the dead line in its own career 
in failing to detect the great task set before all 
Christians, which is to reclaim our brothers so that 
all may be one family in Christ Jesus. This is enough 
to command, as it did so definitely in Jesus’s day, 
the strongest of living men—this establishing of the 
kingdom of righteousness! ‘‘Close up, friends of 


The Morale of the Dynamic Religion 303 


God! Here is a campaign worthy of your best 
soldiers of the Cross!”’ We are not guardians of a 
conventional piety; but we are champions of a 
power which makes for the redemption of the world. 
Ours is not the faith of “asceticism, which calls the 
world bad and flees from it’’; but rather the reverse, 
a faith for which the world is waiting, a faith which 
sees the world as it is and sets vigorously to work 
making it better. To proclaim the message of love 
to all the world, to make real the power of God unto 
salvation—this is the task of the kingdom, a program 
which inspires a splendid spirit. What wonder that 
it awakens that heroic morale which will not die? 

The enthusiasm of Christianity is at its highest in 
the white heat of evangelism, in the immediate work 
of the salvation of souls. The noblest example of the 
heroism of the Cross is seen among pioneers at work 
in the most distant lands and among themost degraded 
of humanity in the darkest corners ofearth. Thestory 
of the deeds of such souls keeps the altar fires aglow 
in the hearts of the Churches. But for them and 
the magical story of their deeds the individual Church 
members would lapse into desuetude, ‘“‘playing at 
precedence with their next-door neighbors,” while 
the earth is torn by cruel wars and precious souls 
perish for lack of light and love. 

Where there is a recognized great objective and a 
vision of the splendid program of the kingdom, there 
is possible that daring which will attempt a con- 
quest of the world for Christ and consider any other 
task unworthy of the high attention of a redeemed 
humanity. 


304 A Gospel for the New Age 


A FULL ENLISTMENT 


Two things are necessary for living a great life: 
(1) A great cause to which one may fully commit 
himself and (2) the full enlistment of all his powers 
in that cause. 

It is only when we have fully committed our- 
selves to our Lord and are willing to let him have 
his way with us that the purpose of redemption and 
God’s plans in human life can be accomplished. To 
such souls God opens up the vistas of the future, 
and this in turn begets the high optimism of Chris- 
tianity. Thisis not amatter simply of temperament; 
it is the vision of God begotten by faith in him. God 
lifts the curtains of the future and lets men see 
things to come and feel the thrill of such a vision, as 
into such a cause they commit the whole of their 
powers. Thus it was that young Abraham broke 
with all that was humanly dear and “went out, not 
knowing whither he went; . . . for he looked for a 
city . . . whose builder and maker is God.” In 
that vision was penciled the organized and settled 
tribes when the nomadic days were done. His “‘jour- 
neying”’ was of God, and in that vision of the noble 
young patriot lay in embryo the ground plans of our 
Christian civilization as built upon a pérmanent 
foundation. 

From the obligations begotten of this call of God 
Abraham kept back nothing, and to it he held him- 
self ever true, fully confident that ‘‘his seed should 
be multiplied as the stars in the heavens, and in his 
seed all nations should be blessed.” His close 
‘friendship with God” made that vision to become 
possible, and with the morale begotten by faith as 


The Morale of the Dynamic Religion 305 


the dominant force in his life he journeyed westward 
without a discord in his soul or doubt of the final 
accomplishment of his fair dream. 

When “in the fullness of time” this vision was 
coming to flower and marvelous things were happen- 
ing, Peter joyfully records his life enlistment as 
follows: ‘Thanks be unto God, who hath begotten 
us again by the resurrection to an inheritance 
incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away.” 
Thus he reénlisted in the Master’s cause and became 
the hero-captain of the Cross. Rallying the scat- 
tered forces, he assailed the mob who but a few 
weeks before had crucified his Lord and put him to 
open shame; sending conviction to their hearts, he 
in a single day converted thousands to the despised 
cause and opened the kingdom to the Gentile world. 

More wonderful still is the story of the great 
apostle and expounder of the faith, who went telling 
the good news “from round about Jerusalem even 
unto Illyricum,” regardless of unspeakable perils, 
that all, ‘from the least unto the greatest,”’ might 
know Christ. This was the measure of his objective 
and the extent of his enlistment. And while twenty 
centuries have crossed the periscope of his vision, 
St. Paul is still the apostle of the world’s highest 
hopes and the herald of the Messiah’s kingdom. 
“That I may know him” was the goal of his am- 
bition, the keynote of his great accomplishments; 
and to this he brought a morale which was never 
broken, though beset by perils which, but for the 
fact that they were recorded by his inerrant pen, 
might be called the most extravagant fiction of 
religious literature. His noble optimism still in- 

20 ' 


306 A Gospel for the New Age 


spires the heroism of the age, and his morale is the 
wonder of the world. Such a life history mankind 
will not willingly let die. 

That Christian men should be enthusiastic propa- 
gandists of their own religion stands not only as an 
item of the teaching of their Lord; it is also an ele- 
ment of hisreligion. Having felt the thrill of new life 
in their own souls and having verified its reality in 
their own living, they, like Jerry McAuley and Rodney 
(Gipsy) Smith, never tire of telling the great truth 
to listening and hungry multitudes. It is indeed 
fit for world declaration. All men need its benefits, 
and no joy is so sweet as that felt by one while 
lifting dying men into newness Of life and fellowship 
with God. This soul-stirring new life within, to- 
gether with a splendid objective, makes all such men 
the most enthusiastic advocates of the Master’s 
kingdom. They tell no cunningly devised fable, 
but the glowing message of spiritual life. ‘“‘That 
which we have seen and heard declare we unto you,” 
is still the message of the Cross. 

Such men have ever been the world’s greatest 
statesmen, in the sense of being men of vision, men 
who look far into the future and are not concerned 
with passing events only, but with the abiding needs 
of humanity, and are builders for all time. To such 
men Francis Bacon applied the name of “men of 
longanimity,” and such indeed they are, as they ad- 
just present plans to far-distant accomplishments 
in world uplift. How great is the need of just such 
men in the field of Christian service to-day, with 
their power to foresee the development of present 
tendencies and the outcome of forces silently at 


The Morale of the Dynamic Religion 307 


work. Sir William Ramsey pointed out the fact 
that St. Paul thought in terms of provinces, and his 
aims embraced the conquest of the Roman Empire, 
which would mean ultimately the entire world. 
He saw with that vision which ‘“‘gives life a per- 
spective and atmosphere, which confers distinction 
upon action, which makes politics statesmanship 
and literature prophecy.” 

Men everywhere crave an opportunity, a field 
for worthy activity; but one would scarcely select 
darkest Africa as a place to become famous. “Yet, 
David Livingstone won there his world-wide repu- 
tation as a pioneer of the kingdom of Christ. He 
not only won lasting fame for himself, but turned 
the eyes of Christendom to that seething mass of 
unsaved, degraded humanity. From the beginning 
of time men have worshiped heroes. Of old they 
tracked Julius Cesar across Gaul by the fields he 
laid waste and the villages he burned; but they will 
follow Livingstone across the Dark Continent by 
the light towers he established in that benighted 
land—the waste places which have become bowers 
of beauty and the deserts which have become 
Gardens of Eden. To our ease-loving age and 
visionless churches, the history of Livingstone came 
telling that the age of noble deeds is not dead. If 
to the careless multitude in Africa the story of Living~ 
stone has become as a “‘cloud by day and a pillar of 
fire by night,” leading them out of heathen bondage, 
his influence upon the self-satisfied churches was no 
less powerful and inspiring. 

In 1842 he first set foot upon African soil, and for 
fifteen years he labored practically alone for the 


3808 A Gospel for the New Age 


uplift of that degraded race of mankind. In 1857 
he landed back in England, the most famous in- 
dividual in all the British Empire. After being 
lionized by all England, with a popularity which 
surpassed that of the nation’s greatest statesman, 
he, in his gentle Scotch modesty, hid himself away 
in his native home in Scotland to write out the story 
of his “Missionary Travels.”’ This he did in the 
hope of securing means for another expedition to 
Africa; “‘for,’’ said he, ‘‘so far as my calling is con- 
cerned, the end of my geographical feats is only the 
beginning of my missionary enterprise.” 

What but the grip of the kingdom, the impelling 
force of love, could have held him to such a task 
and given him such invincible morale through all 
those years of perils almost surpassing human 
belief? He had no thought of the spectacular or 
dream of fame. His sole aim was to do the will of 
Him who had called him and to finish the task 
assigned him. In this his courage never failed. 
In his labors he saw in the distance, not an Africa 
to be exploited and a race to be made captives and 
sold into slavery; but in that vision he saw the 
beauty of an uplifted and glory-clad Africa as a 
powerful Christianized race crowned with the dream 
of manhood. And when the history of that accom- 
plished fact shall have been written, Livingstone’s 
name will stand as the Apostle of the Dark Con- 
tinent, and his star will appear with undimmed 
luster of no less magnitude than that of the Apostle 
Paul. 

How great is the contagion of character! When 
Livingstone’s life work was done and his body 


The Morale of the Dynamic Religion 309 


brought home for interment, the promoters of Africa 
prevailed upon Henry M. Stanley to return to the 
continent that had made him gray and take up the 
scientific task of his fallen chieftain. He advertised 
for forty young lieutenants to accompany him, saying 
that most of them would leave their bones in Africa 
without wealth or renown. “Come,” said he, ‘‘dare 
the great adventure, endure and die, perhaps to be 
forgotten.” The next morning twelve hundred 
thronged his door, regretting, like Nathan Hale, 
that they “‘had but one life to give.” 

But will the Cross find such response to-day? 
Go ask the fifteen hundred and more missionaries 
actually at work in Africa to-day. Ask of Robert 
Laws and those who came after him—Mackay, 
“Uganda’s Man of Work,” also Jean Kenyon 
MacKenzie and the army of noble women who 
follow in her ‘“‘trail.’”’ Go, part the shoulder-high 
grass on the banks of the great Congo, and with 
lifted hat read the inscription on the tomb of Ala- 
bama’s noblest son, Samuel J. Lapsley, who in the 
flower of young manhood laid down his heroic life, 
not for Africa’s wealth, but for the uplift of her 
countless swarthy millions. Ask about the late 
Walter Russell Lambuth, who tramped a thousand 
miles across the wastes to Wembo Nyama and back 
to establish a life-saving station there. Ask also of 
Prof. John Wesley Gilbert, D.D., gentleman of 
color and companion to Bishop Lambuth, who 
uttered as noble a sentiment as history records. 
Said he: “If a spear or bullet ever reaches you, 
Bishop, it will have passed through my body first.” 
By the hands of thousands at work there to-day— 


310 A Gospel for the New Age 


frail women not a few among them—the banners of 
the cross are kept gayly afloat on the breezes of — 
heaven’s promises of the coming day. In all ages 
of Christendom the pioneers of the Cross have been 
and are still the vanguards of heralding of hope on 
the outposts of civilization—the morning stars of 
God’s new age and greater world era. 

Religious enthusiasm in a bad cause is always 
evil and a breeder of strife; but in a righteous cause 
it is the very salt of the ages. God’s plans find 
expression in the daring of men of such enthusiasm, 
and the progress of humanity finds in the men and 
women who possess it a ready vehicle as a means of 
accomplishing its purpose and winning its victories. 


FAITH THE VICTORY 


Sum up as we may the fruits of the traits of the 
Christian morale, the list will not be complete 
without the story of its achievements by fazth. 
““This is the victory which overcomes the world,” 
the secret of vision which has given the future its 
wonderful pull in human character and strengthened 
the human heart for prolonged struggle and final 
triumph. Yet it was Thomas Huxley, at whose 
shrine so many bow, who said in his ‘‘ Lay Sermons”’ 
that “faith was the cardinal sin of science.”’ This 
is one of the foolish notions and careless state- 
ments too often found in the history of great men, 
making it pertinent for Mr. Romanes in his 
“Thoughts on Religion” to retort: ‘‘What a hell 
science would have made of the world if she had 
abolished the ‘spirit of faith’ even in human re- 
lations!” 


The Morale of the Dynamic Religion 311 


The world can never pay its debt to the men of 
faith. Without faith—faith in themselves, in the 
future, and in God, the source and giver of all real 
triumph—how could the wonders of human progress 
ever have been accomplished? Ours is the greatest 
of all ages, yet there was a time when the won- 
ders of our age, of science even, were undreamed 
of, and when such conceptions often stole into the 
minds of men as mere dreams. But for the spirit 
of faith leading to the investment of mental powers 
in the accomplishment of such far-off fancies, what 
would our age be to-day? It was faith in the na- 
ture of man which fixed the “star of empire” 
in its westward course; faith that led Columbus 
across the trackless seas to “‘stub his toe against the 
Western Hemisphere.” Faith in the Puritan Fathers 
led them to plant the gospel in the New World and — 
wrest an empire from the grasp of foolish King 
George; and their sons ‘‘by faith’’ wrote for us the 
greatest governmental document ever bequeathed 
to man. It was faith in the heart of Cyrus Field 
that enabled him to collect $5,000,000 from his New 
York audience before breakfast, which made pos- 
sible the laying of the Atlantic cable to belt the 
globe with the flash of intelligence and anchor the 
continents of earth in the harbor of New York. 
Faith in the accomplishment of the “still greater 
task’”’ pushed the explorer to the uttermost parts of 
the earth, to sound its ocean’s depths and scale its 
loftiest mountains and stake off its continents and 
islands on the map of intelligence. But a still 
greater faith fires the soul of the children of God’s 
household with a desire to give to the benighted 


312 A Gospel for the New Age 


millions of earth the Lamp of Light and the Bread of 
Life. 

These men of faith, men who could trust God and 
dare to do his will, have been the heroes of an il- 
lustrious past and are to-day the harbingers of a 
still more illustrious future. It is when men ap- 
proach the throne of God with a faith which says, 
“It shall be done,” that God is able to accomplish 
his purposes through human instrumentality. In 
such men we discover the high morale of Chris- 
tianity, in whom is manifested not ‘‘great acting,” 
but ‘‘greatness in action,” and this we know is true 
heroism. Such men go forward with an unshaken 
confidence in the ultimate triumph of the kingdom 
of God, and are sustained by a faith entrenched in 
the promise: ‘‘Lo, I am with you even unto the end 
of the world.” It is through such men that God 
brings his marvelous purposes to pass. 

Nothing short of such full enlistment and such 
trust can measure up to the fullness of redemption 
or meet its obligations. Nothing else would be 
pleasing to God. Just such traits as these—namely, 
spiritual optimism, the enlistment of all one’s powers, 
and a definite program with the compelling power 
of faith—make Christianity the most dynamic force 
in life and religion a most blessed reality. In summ- 
ing it all up let it be said, Christianity is spiritual life. 


CHAPTER XIV 


CHRISTIANITY: THE ULTIMATE RELIGION 


HIS ULTIMATE DOMINION 


“At the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things 
in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; 
and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is 
Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”—Philippians ti. 
rye? be 





HIS ULTIMATE GLORY 


“Every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, 
« heard I saying, Blessing, and honor, and glory, and 
power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne 
forever and ever. And the four beasts said, Amen. And the 
four and twenty elders fell down and worshiped him that 
liveth forever and ever.’”’—Revelation v. 13, 14. 


CHAPTER XIV 
CHRISTIANITY: THE ULTIMATE RELIGION 


THAT Christianity is the ultimate religion is not 
an afterthought of theology; it is inwoven with the 
very texture of the teachings of Jesus. Yet it was 
a most difficult thought for the disciples to realize. 
Even after having grasped the idea that the kingdom 
of heaven is not of this world, it was next to impos- 
sible to convince them that the religion of Jesus was 
not ethnical and redemption was not confined to the 
Jews or to any one nation, but was world-wide in 
its nature and application and sought the salva- 
tion of all mankind. Peter was no doubt the best 
equipped of all the disciples, yet it required the house- 
top vision at Joppa, when the sheet was let down 
out of heaven, to convince him that ‘‘God is no 
respecter of persons: but in every nation he that 
feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted 
with him.’! That which to us in this far-off day is 
the crowning feature of Christianity was to the Jews 
in Jesus’s time a thought most unthinkable. 

From the first the newly outpoured Holy Spirit 
broke over the walls of long-standing Jewish preju- 
dices and began its world-wide sweep. Yet in all 
ages of Christianity this same human narrowness 
and prejudice has had to be broken down. Men have 
always been slow to realize this one essential of 
the Christian religion, that Jesus was a world- 
citizen, the ideal for every nation and a contemporary 


‘Acts x. 34, 35. 
(315) 


316 A Gospel for the New Age 


of every age, the inspiration of all classes and the 
brother of every individual. His religion is never 
out of date, and the gospel seed germinates in any 
soil and bears a native fruit in every race. 

Christ’s confidence in his own gospel was such as 
to warrant his great command: “Go ye into all the 
world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” 
Now, what shall be the final outcome of this world- 
wide enterprise? The estimate of a great leader 
rests not so much upon the brilliancy of his utterances 
or deeds as upon the ultimate fruit of his teachings. 
Christ rested his entire future on this foundation. 
He did not strive to convince men by the cogency 
of logic. He rarely argued with men, but threw out 
the challenge, ‘‘Every tree is known by its fruits,” 
or ‘‘Wisdom is justified by all her children.” On 
this basis he was willing to risk the entire future of 
his kingdom. The tree may be of slow growth, but 
the future will justify its existence because of its 
fruit. In this test Jesus has withstood the bitter 
persecutions of the ages and to-day throws his ban- 
ners to the breezes in a challenge to a conquest of 
the world. 

A WORLD RELIGION 


But what is there in Christianity to lead one to 
conclude that it is a world religion, or that of the 
many religions of earth it is best suited to the needs 
of men in all ages and in all lands? How may men 
in the non-Christian countries be made to feel that 
the ‘‘white man’s religion” is better suited to them 
than the traditional faith wherein they were born? 
When it is remembered how long the Far Eastern 
civilizations have existed and how deeply they are 


Christianity: The Ultimate Religion 317 


intrenched in their pagan faith, it can readily be 
seen that there must be potent reasons for the change 
of faith if these countries are ever to be Christian- 
ized and lifted to a higher civilization. The fruit of 
the new faith must be made apparent. Its worth 
must be real. 

This is not simply a question of religious propa- 
ganda; it is an essential fact in the life and future of 
Christianity. Is the religion of Jesus superior to all 
other faiths? or shall the time ever come when the 
banners of Christ shall give place to those of pagan 
beliefs? If there are better and greater truths than 
the Christian faith, would it not be right and best 
to adopt them and let our Christianity be forgotten? 
Who can be satisfied with less than the best in mat- 
ters of faith? Such a thought as this is not merely a 
question of religious rivalry. Nor is it a pride of 
belief which stirs us to active inquiry. Souls alive 
to eternal interests prefer not to follow an ignis 
fatuus through life only to be denied admission to a 
place with the redeemed in glory. 

Considering only the general trend of history and 
seeing that the shores of time are strewn with the 
wrecks of institutions that have perished, some men 
are wont to say glibly enough: “Christianity will 
pass away. Other religions have flourished and have 
died, and the same fate in the process of time awaits 
Christianity. Why should there not arise one greater 
than Christ? and why should he not establish a 
religion as much greater than Christianity as that 
is greater than all others, so that Christianity shall 
go the way of all the earth?” 

To answer this dogmatically would require the 


318 A Gospel for the New Age 


finest prophetic spirit and the divining of that which 
God himself has not revealed. But are there not 
elements in Christianity which reassure its abiding 
nature, and is there not a world-wide potency about 
it? One does not proceed far in the comparative 
study of religions to discover the evident superiority 
of the Christian belief over all others. But who has 
forgotten the uneasy sensation that was felt at the 
first thought of bringing Christianity into comparison 
with other religions of the earth? What a sense of — 
the incongruous was felt in contemplating the com- 
parison of our spiritual finer-fibered Christianity 
with the grosser, more superstitious faiths of pagan- 
ism! Much distress was felt in conservative circles 
lest any serious interest in non-Christian religions, 
long denounced as false, might impair the supremacy 
of the Christian religion. It was thought that to 
treat with respect the religion of the Far East was 
to pay tribute to Satan and rob Christ of his crown. 
But the foreboding was not fulfilled. The pagan 
religions all have their worth, or they could not have 
lived. Christianity is not to be built up by pulling 
down all other faiths. 

The chief benefit that scientific study of religion 
has given to the world has been, not only to expose 
the insufficiencies of other religions, but to show the 
enduring superiority of Christianity. The universal 
religious phenomena have been frankly admitted 
and an impartial comparison of their modes of ex- 
pression considered as a necessary condition of the 
knowledge of the race. The study of the philosophy 
and history of religion, while it has destroyed many 
prejudices, corrected many false opinions, and 


Christianity: The Ultimate Religion 319 


brought to light many admirable features of the 
religious life beyond the confines of Christianity, 
has shown most clearly the point at which the pagan 
religions fall short of the power for the thorough 
transformation of character—and this alone is 
salvation. 

THE RELIGION OF LIFE 

Our Saviour’s own declaration of himself was: 
“T am come that they might have life, and that 
they might have it more abundantly.” 

While Christianity teaches the suppression of 
animalism, of all worldliness, and inculcates “ keep- 
ing the body under and bringing it into subjection”’ 
as an essential to spiritual supremacy, the religions 
of the Far East teach the disregard of all human life 
as the highest attainment in religion. Students of 
comparative religions tell us that in reading the 
Vedas one is impressed with the vastness of duration 
and the enormous lengths assigned to material 
objects. ‘‘The earth is described as a plain whose 
diameter is 170,000,000 miles, and we read in another 
place of a mountain 60 miles high. We are of a 
period of duration 4,000 million of million of years.’”2 
Such calculations stagger the imagination and defy 
the powers of computation, yet they have their 
roots not in the poetic imagination, but in the prosy 
reality of the nothingness of human life. The out- 
ward universe, appearing invulnerable by time, 
becomes an object of reverence; while individual 
life, so transitory and futile, becomes an object of 
contempt. Hence in the Asiatic’s view it becomes 


«The Originality of Christ,” George Matheson. (Ameri- 
can Tract Society.) 4 


320 A Gospel for the New Age 


his religious duty to yield up his petty being to the 
abiding life of Nature and to desire no other life 
but its life, no immortality but what Nature enjoys. 
“Tt was this, implicitly contained in Brahminism, 
that ultimately broke forth with startling power in 
the creed of Gautama Buddha.” In his “Light of 
Asia’”’ Sir Edwin Arnold grows quite eloquent over 
the case of an old Brahmin saint who threw herself 
down to be devoured by a lank, famished wolf in 
which she fancied the embodied spirit of some il- 
lustrious ancestor. This deed the poet would have 
rival in vicarious beauty our Saviour’s gift of his life 
upon the Cross for the sins of the world, as being 
done in the cosmic spirit of self-giving. While 
seemingly done in the noble spirit of sacrifice, it 
was really a homage to Nature, made because life 
was deemed not worth living. Such was the teaching 
of her religion. The noblest act of a Brahmin saint 
is to surrender individual life and be absorbed back 
into the great Nirvana of eternal rest—as a drop of 
water falling back into the ocean. Buddha con- 
sidered the goal of all human blessedness to be 
emancipation from all desires. We hear him say: 
‘Life is will, will is egoism, egoism is desire, and 
desire is misery.” Hence the highest hope of man is 
the extinction of separate individual life. 

Such a philosophy is intensified pessimism. Bud- 
dha speaks; but the whole life of the world is against 
him. He is exalted, he is gracious, full of pity and 
benign; but from the Christian’s viewpoint, he is 
the victim of an immeasurable and hideous mistake. 
Such a religion has had its ideals and its heroes, but 
is without power over evil. To-day paralysis is 


Christianity: The Ultimate Religion 321 


upon the heart of Indian civilization. Social progress 
is not the part of a Hindu’s dream. Science in the 
true sense of the word, there is none in the land of 
Buddha. Universal] education there is none. “Such 
achievements in science, in philosophy, in govern- 
ment, in institutional life as are found in the West, 
there are none. Profound and metaphysical dream- 
ings constitute the huge system of opinion. Imagi- 
nation takes the place of intellect, prejudice dis- 
places conscience, and endless broodings the will.’ 
This is where the contempt of life has held sway for 
centuries. It is scarcely necessary to indicate the 
superiority of Christianity over Buddhism, which 
perhaps is the greatest of the pagan faiths. 

The supremacy of Christianity among the reli- 
gions of mankind rests upon the verdict of life. 
Christ declared to the world: ‘I am the light of the 
world.”’ Wherever that light shines there is newness 
of life. In Christ’s presence all contempt of life 
disappears, and the sigh for relief from distress in 
death is forgotten. Where he is, the hum of human 
interest becomes universal. Men forget their un- 
beliefs in the joy of living. Wherever he has gone 
existence has become a passion, and his disciples 
are filled with the “surprise of being.”” They who 
know and serve him best say: “O, I have just be- 
gun to live.” In the nations who want to live 
there is no rival to the religion of Christ. He not 
only claimed a conquest of the world when he ut- 
tered the great commission, ‘‘Go ye into all the 
world,”’ but pledges his life-giving presence and 

3 Ultimate Conceptions of Faith.” G. A. Gordon, p. 266. 
(Houghton Mifflin Co.) 

21 


322 A Gospel for the New Age 


proffers grace supreme wherever souls have burdens 
and hearts have pain. Because the instinct of life 
is ineradicable and the desire to live prevails more 
and more whenever life is normal, the religion of 
Christ, which is the religion of life, must prevail. 


THE RELIGION OF LOVE 


Again, the religion of Jesus is the religion for all 
mankind because it is the religion of a holy love. 
The God of Christ is the God of Love. He “‘so loved 
the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that 
whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but 
have everlasting life.”” Where Egoism says, ‘‘ Life is 
desire and desire is misery. - The highest virtue is 
the scorn of life’’—and that is suicidal—Christianity 
says: “Life is divine, is love, and love is joyful, is 
optimistic, and is radiant with eternal hope.’’ Not 
to desire the permanence of a joyful existence is 
anti-Christian and insane in principle. The high 
mission of Christ was to fill all the world with the 
passion of a holy love and abiding life and joy. 

It was perhaps the most brilliant achievement of 
Christ that in projecting a conquest of the world 
he threw himself upon the waves of “the earliest, 
strongest, and deepest passion of nature,” and ap- 
plied its dynamics to his high cause. He saw, what 
others seem to have overlooked, that there is the 
power house of a world enterprise, that holy love 
“conquers distance, outlives all ages, and bears 
up beneath the strains of the most divers opinions.” 
He summons this passion to meet the severest tests 
of faith. For the first time in history he weds 
righteousness and holy passion, and himself becomes 


Christianity: The Ultimate Religion 823 


the embodiment of the united forces. Through the 
hearts of his disciples he sent the thrill of his own 
love, and they became one with him. He makes 
unqualified demands upon his followers on the ground 
that their love and allegiance to him will bear them 
up in their obedience. To love him was to be 
righteousness; but to deny him was the highest 
disobedience, was to forfeit all. He that would not 
leave all and follow him was not worthy to be his 
disciple. This ‘forsaking all’? has its hardships, 
but it had also its compensation, its glorification 
in the sweetest divine companionship. 

While righteousness is the foundation principle 
and first word in Christianity, it is by no means 
the last word. Jesus plainly taught that the right- 
eousness of the kingdom of heaven must exceed the 
old righteousness of the day, but the new religion 
blossomed into a fairer flower. Righteousness is a 
forensic principle, a matter to be adjusted by the 
judges. The religion of Jesus is an impulse of the 
heart, a soul warmth that waits for no man to adjust. 
This as a principle had been largely overlooked in 
religion. Love was the word which Jesus gathered 
from the scattered pages of the ancient law in setting 
forth the principles of his kingdom. With this word 
he met the challenge: “Which is the greatest com- 
mandment?” With it also he answered the question, 
“What shall I do to inherit eternal life?’”’ It is the 
supreme word in all his ethical teachings and is 
aglow in the writings of the apostles. St. Paul gives 
it priority as the greatest of virtues (1 Cor. xiii.), 
and St. John gives it setting as follows: “ Beloved, 


324 A Gospel for the New Age 


let us love one another; for love is of God; and every 
one that loveth is born of God.”’ (1 John iv. 7.) 
That principle which Jesus broadcast by use of 
the word “‘love” is not that saccharine sentimental- 
ity and parasitic clinging which is so detrimental 
when mixed in religion to-day, but (“Aya7) that 
profound something which is most vital, that sub- 
lime principle which St. Paul places above all else 
when he says: “I am persuaded, that neither life, 
nor death, nor angels, . . . nor things present, 
nor things tocome, . . . norany other creature, 
shall be able to separate us from the love of God, 
which is in Christ Jesus.’”’* Following the line of this 
love, which is ‘‘the fulfilling of the law,” we arrive 
at righteousness, which is the correlative of love. 
With Christ a loveless righteousness is an impos- 
sibility. Following the line of duty, we emerge into 
love—not a sickly sentiment, but a virile, rational, 
authoritative principle. By seeking first the right- 
eousness of God’s kingdom we find the love of Christ. 
Thus we discover that love is writ large in all the 
teachings of Jesus. It was this principle aglow in all 
his acts and words that made his religion so real 
and vital and, since reality administers to life, so 
blessed when applied to the life of to-day. On this 
principle Jesus would dare enlist men and commis- 
sion them to the accomplishment of his kingdom. 


God Is Known Through Love 


It is the glory of Christianity that it is a religion 
born of a power which ijeads to a knowledge of God 
and fellowship with him. It is through the avenue 


*Romans viii. 38, 39. 


Christianity: The Ultimate Religion 325 


of love that we may really come to know God. 
Certain scientists tell us that it is impossible to 
know God and that we must let the quest alone 
forever. Says one: “‘I have searched the heavens for 
years and have not found God.” True, God cannot 
be found that way. We do not test friendship by 
the stethoscope, nor find God by the telescope, nor 
by material analysis. But we may know God as we 
know man; not by dissection, but by a higher meth- 
od. We know man by the touch of his genius, by 
the breadth of his wisdom and the force of his love. 
The secret of the knowledge of God is not so far 
away as the untamed ambition and _ intellectual 
pride of men would have it be; but is within reach 
of the hand of daily kindness and the heart of daily 
love. Love begets love and answers to love; and 
as God is love, so here is the one source of the knowl- 
edge of God. Love is not felt for a doctrine, or 
awakened by a miracle, but by a person. The love 
of Christ is not a vague ecstasy, but a living power, 
the application of one man’s life force to the life of 
another in need, as in the parable of the Good 
Samaritan. 

Here our Lord planted himself. Love to God was 
the greatest law, and to love one’s neighbor was like 
unto it. Such an affection awakened not the spirit 
of the bondservant, but of sonship. If the Christian 
religion were primarily doctrine, it might have been 
taught by a book, by a system, not by a Saviour as 
a person to a person. But as a contagious spirit of 
power Christ would send it' to the uttermost parts 
of the earth. 


326 A Gospel for the New Age 


AN INSPIRING FORCE 

The ultimate religion, the religion of the future, 
must needs be not only a theory, but an inspiration 
as well. It must not only tell mankind what they 
are, what they need and should do, but it must bring 
with it an inspiring force which shall create in men a 
desire to be and a determination to do. Hence we 
find the religion of Jesus, the religion of the future, 
to be an inspiring love, applicable to all hearts in 
all lands. 

As a worship Christianity is not a religion of fear 
ard beats no tom-toms to keep off evil spirits; but 
it is the atmosphere of love and gladness and life. 
Here glad spirits meet around one common mercy 
seat. Here is found that ‘‘choice spot,’ into which 
all may climb and there, in the atmosphere of love, 
stand close beside the throne of God. Here we surely 
meet with God, feel his presence, and hear the music 
of the universe, the key to all melody. That emi- 
nence is the Temple of Love, and the inspiration 
of the music is surely Love itself. 

But, as Boyd Carpenter puts it: “Seeing that only 
love can create love, love must be found in the object 
of worship as well as in the heart of the worshipers. 
In other words, the religion of the future must be 
based on a Person rather than an Idea.’’> In the 
recognition of this truth will be found the synthesis 
of the religion and morals of Christianity. To love 
God is to be like him; to be like him is to know him; 
and this interrelation of knowledge and likeness can 
only exist between living beings and the Living 


”? 


Permanent Element of Religion, 
VIII. (The Macmillan Co.) 


Carpenter, Lecture 


Christianity: The Ultimate Religion 327 


One—“ whose breath is their life and from whom 
they came and to whom they go.” As the eye is for 
the beautiful and the ear for melody, so the heart is 
for love, and love is for God. 


Not A CLASS RELIGION 


The claims of Christianity to being the ultimate 
religion rest, also, upon the fact that it is not the 
friend, but the foe, of all class distinctions. Here 
pagan faiths find their limitations. While some of 
them hold to the sacredness of a cow because of 
her usefulness to the human family, they teach that 
a woman has no soul and the birth of a gir] in a family 
is a visitation of the evil spirits and a calamity to the 
family. Considered as having no soul, woman has 
no place in the religious systems. 

It is a fact of history that Christ was the first 
great religious teacher to admit women to all the 
institutions of discipleship. Women were among 
his closest friends and holiest saints. Lazarus, 
“‘whom Jesus loved,’’ was not nearer to him than 
were his sisters, Mary and Martha; nor did anyone 
linger nearer in the desperate dark hour or was truer 
to him than Mary Magdalene, “last at the cross and 
first at the tomb.”’ She, a woman, was first to feel 
the matchless thrill of the presence of the risen Lord 
and first to receive the gospel commission, “Go, 
tell” the glad message of the resurrection. And this 
to one who, according to pagan religion, had no soul! 

All down the ages Christianity has made no dis- 
tinction of sex, and none have entered into and ap- 
preciated more highly the religion of our Lord than 
have the women of Christendom. Often but for 


328 A Gospel for the New Age 


them and their living fidelity Christianity had died 
out. To-day in missionary effort women have power 
and win hearts where others are denied admission. 
St. Paul states the great principle thus: ‘‘There is 
neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor 
free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all 
one in Christ Jesus,’® announcing a principle of 
Christianity which was unique in that it was not a 
faith of the masculine gender only. Man in tyran- 
nical lordship had long relegated woman to a lower 
rank and called her the “weaker sex,”’ but Christ 
gave her with others entrée to the inner chambers of 
the King’s palace in religion.. What other religion 
has ever taught this broad principle of faith, and 
where outside the domains of Christianity is there 
a territory ten miles square where woman is exalted 
and her honor safe? This glory Christianity would 
bring to all the world and every enslaved woman of 
earth’s benighted races. 


Not A RELIGION OF A CASTE 


Nor is Christianity the religion of any caste what- 
soever. Her bitterest opponents and most difficult 
problems are found in those countries where for ages 
custom has allowed men to bind their fellows in 
caste bondage. Wherever caste is found, whether 
in ancient India with its high caste and low—out- 
castes in fact—dividing mankind of common blood 
into classes as distinct as if they were of different 
races, or whether in Europe with its aristocratic, 
peacock-titled class, or in America with its mon- 
eyed snob aristocracy—wherever found, caste is 


6Galatians iii. 28. 


Christianity: The Ultimate Religion 329 


distinctly anti-Christian. In nothing is the gospel 
leaven more definitely at work than in the ‘‘melting 
pot”’ of American society. Here every one finds the 
God-given right of fellowship in the “brotherhood 
of man.” 

It was a sad fact that of the many nations en- 
gulfed in the World War, all but three of them were 
so-called Christian nations; yet not till then did this 
world-wide principle of Christianity find an occasion 
of universal application. Then it was that men from 
all around the earth stood shoulder to shoulder in 
the trenches and fought as brother for brother for 
“‘liberty,’”’ meaning the right to be recognized as 
man, having equal opportunity with all other men 
and so treated in all lands. It was Christianity 
which fanned this spark into a holy flame in the 
breast of men and nations. This same leaven at 
work abolished the traffic in African souls and rid 
the world of the curse of human slavery. The same 
spirit is seen at work to-day in the world-wide labor 
agitations as poor, half-awakened humanity strives 
blindly enough for a right which they instinctively 
feel to be their native heritage, little dreaming, 
however, that such a boon can be enjoyed only 
as the Spirit of Christ is faithfully and lovingly 
followed. 

It may be a long journey to the realization of such 
a vision, and weary centuries may need to pass before 
the caste spirit is eliminated from human society; 
yet this is the task set before Christianity, and “the 
equal rights of man” is the light which gilds the 
hilltop of this far-distant hope. 

Nor is Christianity the religion of the educated few. 


330 A Gospel for the New Age 


Perhaps the noblest expression of the religion of this 
class is to be found in the “Phedo” dialogue of 
Socrates on “the immortality of the soul.” This 
has the value almost of a voice from beyond, since 
it was Socrates’ last discourse just before he drank 
the hemlock which caused his death. A nobler 
presentation of the doctrine could scarcely be made, 
yet it has faded from the opinions of men. It taught 
the immortality of the favored few, that the “ Elysian 
Fields’”’ were for the philosophers and for them alone. 
This was a fascinating doctrine and very flattering 
to the Grecian mind, but it failed of duration and 
long since gave place to a nobler belief of world-wide 
application. No one to-day would advocate such 
a faith. Such pagan philosophy has injected its 
beliefs into Christian theology and caused the Church 
no little confusion in all ages of its history. The 
Gnostics divided humanity into two camps. The 
one they called pneumatic, or “spiritual,’’ whom they 
held were constitutionally receptive of Christ’s 
revelation and eternal life. The other camp they 
called hylic, or ‘‘material,”” whom they considered 
were doomed to perish. This same “dualism”’ is 
kept afloat still in the doctrine of “‘election,’’ which 
adds no little confusion to the Christian faith to-day. 
Hegel, the prince of German Gnosticism, taught 
that “religion is the knowledge reached (by specula- 
tive processes) by the finite spirit of its real nature as 
infinite spirit.”” “To adopt such a doctrine would 
be to close the doorway of the inner kingdom against 
all who did not possess the speculative truth.’””? 


“Jesus and Christian Character,’ Peabody, pp. 176, 
177. (The Macmillan Co.) 


Christianity: The Ultimate Religion 331 


All this is class religion, and directly opposed to 
the “‘whosoever”’ of the Scriptures. St. Paul speaks 
of men “‘who by wisdom knew not God,” intimating 
that by the intellect alone is not the way to know 
God or fulfill his will. Intellectualism was not a 
creed taught by our Lord Jesus Christ; nor did he 
rebuke Thomas for hesitating till he had fuller knowl- 
edge. Christ considered not so much the morality 
of an opinion as he did the morals which gave rise 
to the opinion, the motive and attitude of the thinker 
toward the truth. Obedient life rather that correct 
opinions was his key to all religious knowledge. 
“Tf any man will do his will, he shall know of the 
doctrine.”” While this obedience is possible to all 
men everywhere, intellectualism is not. 

That “good science is good theology’? may be 
true according to the interpretation given to the 
terms; but such expressions are usually the nomen- 
clature of a cult, and this one hints of intellectualism. 
It is too narrow to express the genius of Christianity. 
He who would limit the Christian religion to a cer- 
tain set of accepted opinions—a creed—or to the 
performance of certain pious acts, or to so much 
knowledge, or certain kinds of feelings, would crip- 
ple the religion of Jesus. He did not shut up the 
kingdom of heaven to any such narrowness. The 
“ancient law,” which he incorporated into his teach- 
ings with certain addenda, was: ‘‘Thou shalt love 
the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all 
thy soul, and with all thy might.’ Not one of these 
powers to the exclusion of another, but all of them 
enter into the make-up of Christianity. Christ did 


SDeuteronomy vi. 5. 


332 A Gospel for the New Age 


not shut the hope of eternal life up to intellectualism, 
or to science, or to any other class whatsoever. 
All such notions have gone or are destined to go down 
before the world-wide creed of Christ. In his registry 
are to be found the faithful of every state and station 
in life—the rich and the poor, the high and the low, 
the learned and the illiterate—all who with faith 
and loving obedience walk in his way. 

Since Christianity lays claim to all the noble 
conditions of life and bids her followers to enter into 
them all, it would be a calamity if only the élite, 
the men of learning and luxury, had access to the 
Tree of Life. The call of Christ is not only to the 
favored few, but all mankind. ‘“‘Whosoever will 
may come and take of the water of life freely.” 
This is a gospel principle of race-wide application, 
and is characteristic of the religion of the Lord Jesus 
Christ. 

REDEEMED PERSONALITY 

Human personality touched and purified by reli- 
gion is the most dynamic force in the world. That 
Christ was the embodiment of all this is implied in 
his statement: “‘I am the light of the world.” By 
this he did not mean the kind of light aglow in a 
diamond—a brilliant reflection, but dead. Light is 
the vitalizing agency of the world. The light of 
Christ is a life-giving power, is the whole of the gospel 
told in a single thought. Light and life—these two 
words hold in their grasp the entire sweep of world 
evangelization and progress. In whatever age or 
country the light of Christ has been let to shine, 
there life and hope and God have been found. The 
enthralling glory of Christ touched and transformed 


Christianity: The Ultimate Religion 333 


the personality of his disciples and the first great 
apostle. The passion of the Orient is aglow in St. 
Paul’s self-absorption in the metaphysical Christ. 
Said he: ‘For me to live is Christ. . . . I 
live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” Love and 
fiery devotion could go no further, unless it were to 
enlist that devotion in a world-saving enterprise 
for the purpose of bringing all others into the same 
knowledge of Christ and fiery devotion to him. 
Such is redeemed, Christianized personality. 

The name of Christ was no fetish on the lips of the 
apostles to charm superstitious people; nor was it 
simply a spur to the emulation of a beautiful life 
and efficient career. That name carried with it a 
rapturous experience and a strong appeal to reason 
and conscience as well as the recognition of a world 
need and a race-wide panacea of relief. 

Christianity stands aloft among the religions of 
earth as the only one with a world Redeemer and 
Saviour. It isseldom an issue as great as the superi- 
ority of the Christian religion over all other religions 
is put so sharply and demonstrated so thoroughly as 
this one was at the Congress of Religions in Chicago 
at the close of the last century. After other speak- 
ers had presented their religions, it came Dr. Joseph 
Cook’s time to represent Christianity. In doing this 
he settled down to the one fact of the forgiveness of 
sins and the redemption of man. At this point he in- 
troduced Lady Macbeth, the murderess of her hus- 
band, with the crimson stains on her hands. How- 
ever much she might wash her hands, saying, “Out, 
damned spot, out,” the condemning stains remained. 
Turning to each of the representatives of the pagan 


334 A Gospel for the New Age 


religions, Dr. Cook said: ‘Gentlemen, is there any- 
thing in your religions that can tell this woman how 
to get rid of this blood and guilt?” But no one made 
answer. Then he said: “‘I will ask another. John, 
can you tell this woman how to get rid of this sin?” 
Waiting a moment, he said: ‘‘ Listen, John is speak- 
ing, and this is what he is saying: ‘If we confess 
our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, 
and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.’”’ 

This is the climax of all religion, the cleansed 
heart and redeemed life. It is the sense of guilt 
fastening itself in the souls of all unredeemed men 
that disturbs the harmony of life. Mr. Kant said 
that there were two things that filled him with awe, 
‘the starry heavens and human responsibility.” 
This responsibility implies the sense of guilt. With- 
out one there could not be the other. Where guilt is 
removed sin has been mastered and harmony re- 
stored, with life started anew on its upward flight. 
It was this that made the Cross mean so much to the 
world. This climactic fact gave the gospel extraordi- 
nary power in the days of the apostles. ‘Christ 
and him crucified,” “‘Christ and the resurrection,” 
“‘Christ the Saviour of the world,’’ were themes with 
which the apostles startled the Gentile world. This 
was the keynote in St. Paul’s evangelism and the 
secret of his marvelous zeal. With this he sought, to 
the utmost of his ability, to carry the gospel to the 
ends of the earth. This same regenerating power 
has kept the kingdom alive all down the ages; and 
with the same enthusiasm men of to-day are carrying 
it to all the nations of the earth. 

It is not simply that Christ was a wonderful teach- 


Christianity: The Ultimate Religion 335 


er or a perfect man that men are seeking to make 
known to the world, but Christ as the Crucified One, 
the Redeemer and Saviour of the world! Every- 
where men are dissatisfied, needy, sinful, sick. In 
all lands the same fatality attends unredeemed life. 
In the Far East, in all non-Christian lands, the same 
wretched conditions of mankind are recognized. 
The Chinese say: ‘‘ We are in a great pit, but there 
is no one to help us out. Weare sick and cannot heal 
ourselves.” The Young Turks admit: ‘We know 
there is a better life just ahead, but we have not the 
power to grasp it.”” The Hindus know that Brah- 
minism has no hope to offer. Neither the Grecian 
nor Roman religions had a redeemer. Mohammed 
had only a paradise of sensuality to offer. All other 
religions stop short of a power for the thorough 
transformation of character. They contain no 
central Personality morally adequate to deal with 
the conscience, with the heart and will. They have 
no world Saviour, hence no personal Redeemer to 
offer. They are without the vitality that can give 
life to a soul dead in trespasses and in sin. ‘‘The 
more we study the pagan faith and estimate their 
fitness to administer to the needs of man, the more 
obvious becomes their moral inadequacy. They 
have heroes, sages, and prophets; but they have no 
one to take the place of Christ the Saviour of the 
world.’’!° 

It is the crowning glory of Christianity that it 
seeks man at his worst and brings him to his spiritual 


*Koran, chapter 78, ‘‘ News,” Sale tr. 
10TJniversal Element of the Christian Religion,” Hall, 
pp. 195, 196. (Fleming H. Revell Co.) 


336 A Gospel for the New Age 


best. It starts with the uprooting of sin, but does 
not stop short of the full measure of redeemed man- 
hood. An empty life becomes a filled life; an in- 
complete life is transformed into a perfect life—all 
of which is accomplished through the grace and by 
the power of God. If a mountain must be measured 
by the difference between its loftiest peaks and its 
lowest valleys, a religion must be judged by its power 
to transform the most degraded into the most holy, 
into loftiness of life and character. In this respect 
Christianity stands without a peer. 

In the course of human events and moral progress 
mankind must come to a realization of their need of 
a power greater than they possess by nature by which 
to perfect individual character and to guide the 
affairs of nations. Men are already coming to recog- 
nize the impotency of human nature and the inade- 
quacy of the human intellect to achieve needed 
victory. The recent World War was a fearful demon- 
stration of that fact. As mankind shall awaken 
more fully to their moral needs and shall receive more 
of the light of Christ, the clearer the “miracle of 
character’’—the redemption and uplift of human per- 
sonality—will appear as the glory of Christianity. 
Nor is there a limit to its power and achievement © 
either in time or space. Its periphery is all the earth, 
and its promise is of power ‘‘unto the end of the 
world.”” There is every reason for believing that as 
time passes the Christian religion—with its power to 
re-create the fundamental instincts and faculties of 
the soul, to cleanse and direct the affections and 
endue with the power of the Spirit—shall triumph 
more and more and Christ stand forth before the 


Christianity: The Ultimate Religion 337 


world as the “Desire of all nations,” the Hope of 
humanity, and the Saviour of the world. 


Gop INCARNATE 


Christianity is the religion of life, love, and salva- 
tion, because it is the religion of an Incarnate God. 
Many nations have had the conception of an exalted 
dynasty, such as the “divine right of kings.”” China 
is called the “Celestial Empire” because she taught 
that her rulers originally descended from heaven. 
On the same ground the Mikado of Japan to-day 
is called the “Grandson of Heaven.”’ Greece had 
her Zeus Pater and Rome her Jupiter—Father god 
—the ruler of all the gods. But it remained for the 
Man of Galilee to teach all the world to pray: ‘Our 
Father, who art in heaven.” He was first to reveal 
God as the Spiritual Father of us all. 

The Christian idea of God is a God-Father re- 
vealing himself. How could God sensibly reveal 
himself except in human personality? He has mani- 
fested force in gravitation, energy in electricity, 
beauty in blossoms and in the sunset sky; but when 
he would reveal his moral beauty and grace he must 
needs get into human life and character. How else 
could he reveal the depths of his wonderful love ex- 
cept in the affections of his responsive children? 
Redeemed humanity is the avenue of God’s world- 
wide revelation of himself. In Christ Jesus, God 
came into historical fullness of view in reconciling 
the world unto himself. In Christ Jesus dwelt the 
fullness of the God bodily., Christ found his ul- 
timatum in God. Men find their ultimatum and 
come to their best in Christ Jesus. For this purpose 

22 


338 A Gospel for the New Age 


he lived—that men might find God through him. 
God in man is the region to which Christ would 
lead all trusting souls. This is redemption, this is 
the fullness of life and love and joy! 

Christ has become the world’s symbol for God. 
He was God incarnate; and Christ in us brings God 
into incarnation in every redeemed life. Dr. George 
A. Gordon is in error in saying: ‘‘There is in every 
man a genuine incarnation of God.”’!!. The uncondi- 
tional incarnation would negate all redemption 
through Christ and abandon all need of him. The 
Saviour said: “He that hath my words and keepeth 
them, he it is that loveth me. He that loveth me 
loveth my father also, and we will come unto him 
and make our abode with him.’’ This is genuine 
incarnation; but it is far from being in every man. 
This is incarnation through obedient love, and this 
is redemption. If words have specific meaning, 
this is what our Saviour meant to teach. He came 
to the world not to make a revelation of God, but 
to be one. He is the world’s sovereign medium of 
God, the world’s sovereign assurance of God. As 
prophet, priest, and king, God was with him. As 
Thomas Carlyle has said: “ Higher hath the thought 
of man never gone.’” Can the thought of man reach 
higher? It has the unlimited nature and works of 
God in which to bask and revel and wonder, to soar 
and to sing! Throughout the realms of boundless 
space the soul may wing its flight abroad and revel 
in the wonders of God’s goodness and love; but the 
beauty lies in the fact that his love is all around us 


‘1 Tltimate Conceptions of Faith,” p. 249. (Houghton 
Mifflin Co.) 


Christianity: The Ultimate Religion 339 


here and now. The soul does not have to lose itself 
in the nature of God, like a drop of water falling 
back into the sea, in order to realize the fullness of 
life. Here one really finds himself in the eternal 
reality of the divine presence and discovers what 
Lanier means when he writes: 


As the marsh hen secretly builds on the watery sod, 

Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God: 

I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh hen flies 

In the freedom that fills all the space ’twixt the marsh and 
the skies: 

By so many roots as the marsh grass sends in the sod 

I jwill heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God. 


Finding this fullness of life is to be in Christ as 
he was in the Father, and this is immortality—a 
blessed personal consciousness of fellowship with 
God in time and to all eternity. This is that high 
reality to which every redeemed child of God may 
aspire. Up to this sunlit height, this Mount Olympus 
where life is full and free and love is sane and sweet, 
Christ would lead all mankind there to abide in 
peace and redeemed safety. 


Thus to a small degree we have arrived at a con- 
ception of Christianity as the ultimate religion—a 
religion of the Spirit, having as its goal fellowship 
with the divine Father in time and to all eternity, 
whose impersonation is the “‘Immanuel,’”’ the Infinite 
God incarnate, whose love includes all mankind, and 
is as great as the greatness of God. 





CHAPTER XV 


RELIGION: THE INSTINCT OF IMMORTALITY 


The “new psychology” school defines instinct as “an 
unlearned response to given stimuli,’’ which would imply 
first an outward appeal answered by an inward impulse, a 
purely ‘‘modern”’ concept. ; 

Mr. Edman states the case more accurately. He says: 
*‘An instinct is at once an unlearned mechanism for making 
the response and an unlearned tendency to make it.” 

Mr. McDougall defines thus: ‘“‘Instinct is an inherited 
disposition which determines the possessor in respect to an 
object, to act in regard to it in a given manner, or at least to 
express an impulse to act.”—‘Human Traits and Their 
Social Significance,” pages 19, 20 (Houghton Mifflin Co.). 


CHAPTER XV 


RELIGION: THE INSTINCT OF IMMOR- 
TALITY 


IN speaking of religion as a soul instinct we feel 
that no violence is done to the correct use of lan- 
guage, and no offense should be taken either by 
psychologist or theologian, since the attempt with 
us each is to know what religion really is. In the 
further study of the human mind “primitive in- 
stincts’”’ are coming to be more and more recognized, 
and religion is accorded a chief place among them. 
No one wants to call in question the greatness of 
this instinct; for when religion is reduced to its last 
analysis this is exactly what it is—an instinct of the 
soul as definite as any other impulse of man. 

Instincts in general have been called the “un- 
intelligible intelligence,’ because they bring to 
their possessor a shrewdness not acquired by ex- 
perience and which the keenest intellect cannot al- 
ways fathom. Now this is eminently true of reli- 
gion. Man did not have to acquire it, nor is his 
tendency to worship a fixed habit of heredity. 

Every life cell has its instinct, and every manifesta- 
tion of original impulse is the assertion of an instinct. 
Such impulses are classified as belonging to that 
department of life where they are found. Very 
early in life there is manifest the instinct of hunger; 
this we call an animal instinct. We all feel that very 
early in life a child is but a “bundle of animal in- 

(343) 


344 A Gospel for the New Age 


stincts.”” His first ery of hunger is among his first 
natural miracles. Not to be impressed by such facts 
is to treat lightly the marvels of life with which 
we are surrounded. Such impulses are most properly 
classified as animal instincts. 

Again in the further development of life, and per- 
haps as long as life lasts, there is felt a mysterious 
power which the possessor cannot fully understand, 
amounting in some to what is called a “natural 
gift,’ and in others to the wizard charm of genius. 
Its laws often baffle the shrewdest intellect, because 
it has a way of its own. Now, what shall we call this 
unless it be a mental instinct? © 

Further still there is at work in man a yet more 
mysterious power which deals exclusively with the 
moral nature of man, whispering the sense of duty 
and pointing to nobler things, awakening aspirations 
and cravings which cannot be satisfied by the mate- 
rial things of earth. This instinct differs from and is 
as much nobler than the mental instinct as that is 
more noble than the animal instinct. It has to do 
with the infinite reaches of the soul and as such calls 
for the special term of soul znstinct. It is this master 
instinct in man which thrusts its importance upon 
us and demands investigation. To ignore it would 
be to that extent to leave ourselves in darkness. 


REALM OF MYSTERY IN MAN 


Man, with his marvelous make-up, has always 
been a most fascinating field for investigation. 
After all that has been discovered about him, he is 
still a mystery unto himself. There are still in his 
nature depths unsounded and continents still un- 


Religion: The Instinct of Immoriality 345 


discovered. In no department of his life has the last 
word yet been spoken; hence the unflagging interest 
in himself and the joy he feels on the discovery of 
new traits and when new laws are established. 

Wise indeed is the man who knows how to read 
the code of his own being and can therefore interpret 
the voice of his soul. But who that has made the 
attempt has not found that to do so with certainty 
is a most difficult task? The reason for this is found 
in the fact that when our faculties are doing their 
work normally and undisturbed the machinery of 
life moves so harmoniously and quietly that it is 
next to impossible to discover the various parts, 
much less learn its laws. An old Scotch farmer, on 
being asked if he had good digestive organs, an- 
swered: “TI denna ken that I ha’ any a-tall.” To 
the like inquiry Thomas Carlyle would have an- 
swered: “‘T have at the base of my being a diabolical 
instrument called a stomach.” This he would have 
done because for well-nigh all his life that ill-working 
organ had made him terribly aware of its existence. 

Ideal surroundings are never our best teachers. 
With every want supplied and every law obeyed, 
what incentive have we for investigation, what care 
we for delving into the mysteries of our being? 
We would want to eat, drink, and be merry and call 
ourselves blessed. But let something go wrong with 
the machine, let some law be violated and the har- 
mony of nature be disturbed and life’s music be 
interrupted, then it is that we want to find out about 
ourselves. By this method we discover the existence 
of our faculties and their laws. That “necessity is 
the mother of invention” is not only a truism in the 


346 A Gospel for the New Age 


mechanical world, but is also a hinter of the laws of 
our being which come into recognition in many of the 
calamities of mankind. Then man’s instincts are 
asserting themselves. Why is it that amid the best 
that earth can afford great souls will grow restless, 
refusing to be satisfied with those things which have 
lost their charm in their long, monotonous use, and 
will reach out after something beyond and better 
than anything ever yet known? Yielding to this 
discontent, man obeys the instinct of progress and 
finds the secret of all individual initiative and 
originality. 
SOME NOBLE INSTINCTS 


That man is a creature of noble instincts cannot 
be denied. His nature and activities could never 
be rightly understood without recognizing such im- 
pulses. He holds his high station in the order of 
creation because of that natural endowment known 
as the ‘ethical nature of man’—that judgment 
seat to which all questions of a moral character are 
referred. This same sway of the ethical in man, 
“the still small voice,’ crowns him with the dignity 
of a king. In this realm, as sovereign of his own 
being, man awakes to the realization that he is not 
‘altogether earthly,” but is shot through with kin- 
ship with the divine. Yet while exercising this high 
prerogative man instinctively feels that he himself 
is somehow in subjection to a higher power, and is 
therefore in honor bound to be true—to what, he 
may not fully know. Men speak of being “answer- 
able to humanity” or “accountable to history.” 
They wish to stand well before their fellows, thus 


Religion: The Instinct of Immortality 347 


unconsciously admitting the sway of the ethical 
instinct in themselves. 

There is not a judicial procedure but rests upon 
this innate sense of oughtness. Here are discovered 
ethical principles of an abiding nature, such as are 
beyond the deductions of groping reason, yet are the 
most potent factors in man. We fail of correct 
analysis of man if we overlook this instinct of right 
and wrong, this passion for truth which rings clear 
in the soul of every noble human being. What 
migratory bird ever sang her springtime song with 
a surer instinct or purer joy than is felt by the 
noble hero who gives up life, at the stake even, 
rather than prove false to his conviction of the truth? 
This instinct is the glory of man’s moral nature. 

Nor have we been entirely true to the philosophy 
of life in our failure to recognize our mental instincts. 
We have been charmed by the skill of the mother 
bird in building her first ‘‘tiny infant’s crib,’”’ when 
she weaves the downy substance on the inside of the 
nest for the protection of her tender fledglings; 
but we fail to appreciate the poetic foresight and 
tender care of a human mother whose heart is swept 
with rapturous thrill on clasping her tender babe to 
her breast for the first time. Here is manifest an 
intelligence not learned from books or acquired from 
long experience. Man often finds himself in the 
grasp of power which bears him on to actions by 
impulsive promptings, which not only indicate the 
essentials of life, but which outstrip plodding reason 
and challenge the admiration of the brightest minds. 
Such instincts supply the finest tones of the poetry 
of life. Here all genius expresses itself and real talent 


348 A Gospel for the New Age 


is discovered. 'Thus the inventor accomplishes his 
wonders, the explorer finds his hidden paths, the 
musician sings his soul symphony, and the poet 
writes his immortal dramas. Thus Robert Steven- 
son, the engineer, in swinging his first tubular bridge 
across the Menia Straits, took little credit to him- 
self, feeling that a power beyond himself held him 
in its grasp, enabled him to overcome immense 
difficulties and suggested to him many a new ex- 
pedient. Also William Thackeray, in tracing his 
splendid thoughts upon the page, was amazed more 
than anyone elsé over their excellence; nor could he 
tell whence they came. “Borne on by instinctive 
genius,” says Froude, ‘‘Czsar won his great Gallic 
wars.’ By the same power Kepler read the match- 
less thoughts of God in the highest heavens, and 
Michael Faraday discovered them in the earth be- 
neath. Thus King David awoke chords in tune with 
the infinite; and the captive bard burst forth in his 
immortal soul] lyric of longing for the courts of Je- 
hovah, the divine presence. 


THE GREATEST INSTINCT 


While the instinctive genius of man is expressing 
itself so marvelously in the mental realm, this is 
not the field of the highest expression of human in- 
stinct. That realm is within the soul of man. In 
his spiritual nature, his religious Impulse, and his 
worship of the infinite God, man has ever been clad 
in a halo of mystery. This at its highest tide and in 
its most rapt frenzy passes beyond the reach of the 
rational. Man may not have been able always to 
give to himself, even, an adequate account of re- 


Religion: The Instinct of Immortality 349 


ligious tendencies, nor has he been able to defend 
his worship of the divine Being; still he goes on 
worshiping. Nowhere is the great law of instinctive 
intelligence more manifest than in religion. Here 
man’s sense of the essentials of life or his impulse to 
action waits not to be taught. Very early in the 
development of mind come the capacity and desire 
to know God. Who ever heard of an infidel child, 
or remembers when he first conceived the idea of 
God? “Heaven lies all about us in our infancy.” 
Science in all its boasted geological records of the 
past has never dared to stake off the genesis of the 
religious age of man. Whence then came our re- 
ligion and how so widely scattered over the earth? 

Now, that we may not miss the way of truth, let 
us take a more intensive view of instincts as we 
find them. Wherever found they work by the same 
rule, and to discover this rule will help us no little 
in a perfect understanding of ourselves. 


MAN’s INSTINCTS RECOGNIZED 


We have been so accustomed to recognize the 
marvelous in the instincts of the insects and animals 
as well as certain plants that we have lost sight of the 
fact that the same power is manifest in man. We 
have seen the caterpillar build his first crysalis 
without a mistake, and the oriole weave her swinging 
nest over a running stream and hatch her brood in 
safety. We have seen the young animal reach up 
with unerring aim for its food as the first effort of 
life; and we marvel at the unmatched skill of the ant 
and bee in the construction of their nest and the 
government of their colony with a skill rarely sur- 


350 A Gospel for the New Age 


passed, if indeed equaled, by man’s boasted intel- 
ligence. In the glare of all this we have concluded 
that man has no such power; and we have admitted 
readily enough “that instinct is at its minimum in 
man, while at its maximum in aminals.” 

This power, which is at its maximum in animals 
and insects, works by a fixed law and to a limited 
extent. The bird builds a finished nest on her first 
attempt, and the bee fashions her honeycomb with 
mathematical exactness from the first effort, never 
making an attempt at improvement. They always 
follow the same plan, and have done so from the 
beginning. But in mankind instinctive impulses 
not only furnish man’s powers of initiative, but lead 
onward to intelligent action, thus becoming the 
basis of vast endeavors. All knowledge as well as 
all religion has its beginning and many of its triumphs 
in instinctive impulse. 

Have we been correctly cataloguing our impulses? 
While an infant has much to learn by experience, 
which the rational nature enables him to interpret 
and use to an advantage, there is never an hour in 
his life when his very existence may not depend upon 
his prompt surrender to certain forces which cannot 
be classified except as native instincts. That which 
in lower animals appears as blind impulse is carried 
on higher up in man to the point where rational 
powers can take hold of it as a life clue and personal 
willing becomes a conscious effort and motive of 
power. But who can tell where instinct ceased to 
act? 

In the attempt to classify natural phenomena we 
have divided and subdivided our first impressions 


Religion: The Instinct of Immortality 351 


till we have dislodged many of them from their 
rightful place. Many things that are called “innate 
ideas’”’ and “subconscious mind” and “intuitive 
truths”’ are instinct waves, the product of man’s 
original endowment. By no means does the ex- 
terior world or experience furnish exclusively the 
necessary data which influence our lives for the 
higher and better. A noble life is not made up alto- 
gether of meditative schemes and far-sighted deduc- 
tions. We must admit of influences upon the inner 
being such as the senses can never supply—such as 
constitute that which must be recognized as religion 
and which thrusts itself upon us with immediate 
certainty. While these impulses do not furnish us 
with all the data of religion, they fail not to furnish 
the very basis upon which religion rests. 

Religion furnishes us with the finest example of 
a dictionary definition of instinct—namely, ‘a 
natural and spontaneous propensity which moves 
without reasoning toward that which is essential to 
existence, preservation, and development.” 


SUBJECTIVE RELIGIOUS POLARITY 


Implanted instinct furnished originally and still 
furnishes the tendency to seek God and worship 
him—man’s noblest endowment. Nature nowhere 
furnishes an instinct more unmistakable, and no 
amount of adverse criticism can dislodge it from 
the heart of man. Here is firm footing; all else is 
sand and sea. Mr. Tyndall, with all his habits of 
close thinking, found himself shut up to the conclu- 
sion that ‘Religious feeling is as much a verity as 
any other part of man’s consciousness, and against 


352 A Gospel for the New Age 


it on the subjective side the waves of (adverse) 
science lash in vain.’’! 

What impulse is clearer than man’s polarity of 
soul? Instincts never lead to the abnormal; but 
they point to conditions which are agreeable, bene- 
ficial, and essential. This we find to hold good in 
religion. We are blessed and uplifted by it; we are 
consoled by its truths and our very being is fed by 
it. And no babe ever nestled down in its mother’s 
embrace with a surer sense of rest and safety than 
is felt by the devout soul who commits his all to the 
keeping of an all-provident God. This he does with 
an instinctive faith which asks no proof of a logical 
kind; he “‘has the witness in himself” that all is well. 

While enlightened people have supplanted in- 
stinctive tendencies with the authority of religion, 
there are no valid grounds for discrediting our soul 
instincts as the basis of man’s religious nature. Out 
of this soil grows all that is noble and blessed in re- 
ligion. Without it the Bible would be but a chronicle 
of the dead past and faith an impossibility. 


OBJECTIVE REALITY 


The fact of instinctive impulse argues more than 
a mere meaningless, blind capacity. This subjective 
sense, this craving for a reality outside of ourselves, 
stands as the counterpart of another great fact— 
the existence of the thing desired. Instinctive prompt- 
ings to actions of quest are not lost in the mere energy 
of desiring nor a mere exercise of soul. They are 
not without purpose, but are actions which seek 


‘Fragments of Science,’’ 9th edition, p. 626. (D. Appleton 
Co.) 


Religion: The Instinct of Immortality 353 


something essential to the life and well-being of the 
individual. No instinct ever led to an object which 
did not exist. Nature never prepared an organ for 
a function which was not a part of life. The captive 
beaver may build his dam across the dry floor of his 
prison, but for his imaginary stream there is the 
corresponding reality somewhere. No lungs or wings 
were ever created but called for the atmosphere. 
No plant ever turned its petals up to asunless sky, 
and no songbird ever sang her song of a springtime 
that never came. The objective reality of the in- 
stinctive desire exists somewhere. 

In the instincts of the soul more than anywhere 
else is to be found the highest expression of the law 
of objective reality of the thing desired. If it be an 
axiom of human reasoning that “‘for every adequate 
cause there must be a corresponding result,” so 
also we may say that for every instinctive desire 
there must be a corresponding reality. Mankind 
has a natural longing for congenial spirits, and society 
is the objective reality. He has also an instinctive 
desire for the truth, and fact and the expression of 
reality are the counterparts of this instinct. The 
body realizes its longing and so does the mind, 
but how about the soul? This has its high demands, 
its intense desires; shall the lesser faculties of man 
be gratified in their instinctive longings, and the 
nobler part of man be denied? Man has in his na- 
ture the consciousness of a spiritual power and craves 
association with the divine. His soul cries out 
after God. Shall this ery be mocked by the echo of 
its own wail, be met by only the skeptical laugh of 
derision? Is it possible that man, of all creatures, 

23 


3D4 A Gospel for the New Age 


is the only one deceived when he surrenders himself 
to the sway of his highest and best instincts? Shall 
the faint spark of life in the insects find sure guid- 
ance and birds and bees be crowned with instinctive 
certainty in quest of their wants, while man, the 
noblest expression of God’s creative genius, is left 
to grope in darkness all his days? Shall the ethereal 
thirst in the soul which reached out beyond time 
and space, foreshadowing unseen realities and im- 
mortal joys, be at last found the greatest of all decep- 
tions? Nay, but there is no deception. As the 
sparkling brook flows, answering the thirst of the 
hunted hart, so there must be somewhere an answer- 
ing reality to the soul’s thirst for God. If there were 
no source of the spiritual attraction to cast about the 
soul its matchless magnetism, how account for the 
soul’s instinctive polarity or the sense of the divine 
touch which rests and refreshes the soul as nothing 
else has ever done? 


AFFECTION FOR GOD 


Implanted in the soul of man there is not only the 
instinctive desire to know God and a eapacity for 
that knowledge, but also a latent affection for 
him which when rightly developed brings the soul 
of the devout Christian a sure sense of sonship with 
God which grows inexpressibly sweet as the soul 
approximates God’s majestic life. 

He who would deny man’s ability to find out God 
and love him finds himself confronted by far more 
difficult problems which call for solution. (1) He 
must not only account for the widespread prevalence 
of the idea of God, but (2) he must explain man’s 


Religion: The Instinct of Immortality 355 


soul longing for fellowship with God; (3) he must 
account for man’s belief in his own immortality, 
and (4) also for the expectation that somehow he 
shall attain unto that blessed estate. All of these 
are in a measure instinctive in man and remain 
a part of him. 

If there were no God, whence came this race-wide 
and persistent groping after eternal fellowship with 
him? Into the heart of every man there shines a 
gleam from afar which is the glory of his being. 
There is in every man an insistent hint foreshadow- 
ing an ideal goodness and greatness to which none 
of his fellows has ever yet attained. This impres- 
sion may not remain fixed, but may flit and vanish 
and return again and again, ever keeping alive that 
dissatisfaction with the present attainment which 
every man feels. Even in the savage breast there is 
not lacking that faint whisper which tells him of a 
“happy hunting ground” which some day shall be 
his. Is there nothing of permanent value in the 
persistence with which the sorrowing and bereaved 
heart lingers about the scenes of the separation of 
loved ones, straining every power of vision to pierce 
the darkness or listening with bated breath to catch 
out of the deep silence some response to the heart’s 
sad call? This dream of immortality is an essential 
in the structure of the soul, written there as plainly 
as form is described in the circle or existence is 
expressed in matter. There it stands as a constitu- 
tional element in man, and its originator is God, 
who is the perpetrator of nd delusion. To suppose 
that this instinct of the soul has no counterpart with 
which it shall be satisfied would be to rob mankind 


356 A Gospel for the New Age 


of the fulfillings of his highest hopes and make him, 
not the child of infinite goodness, but the victim 
of an archdeception. 

Where is there a fact which could make the hope 
of immortality more sure? To some minds all this 
may seem but a vision and a dream of the poet’s 
fancy. But to deny the fact would be to leave man 
surrounded by insolvable mystery and permeated 
with hopeless gloom as his heritage forever. Surely 
the hope of immortality has no firmer foundation 
than this of the objective reality of an instinctive 
longing—a fact fixed in the soul of man which cannot 
be gainsaid or otherwise explained. There it stands 
as one of the foundation principles of religion, stead- 
fast and sure. 


THE MEANS OF REALIZATION 


Nor is this yet all that may be discovered in the 
law of instinctive impulse as applied to religion. 
The assurance of objective reality as seen in an intui- 
tive soul desire, even to the very existence of God 
himself, makes necessary another truth which is 
indeed the complement and climax of all the rest— 
namely, that between the soul having the longing 
and the objective Reality there must exist some 
medium of communication, some means of securing 
the end desired. 

Between the soul and its spiritual Fountainhead 
there can be no impassable gulf fixed. The soul’s 
passion for God has deepened its confidence in the 
faculty which is ever trying to find out God. It has 
never yet given over the search. The everlasting 
longing for God may be taken as an implicit capacity 


Religion: The Instinct of Immortality 357 


to receive him and realize his presence. Instinctive 
wants have always found ways of coming into the 
possession of the thing really needed. Did fledgling 
in the nest ever feel the impulse to fly without find- 
ing pinions growing feathers for flight? Has the 
migratory instinct ever disturbed an ostrich which 
has never known real flight? In him there is content- 
ment with his local habitation because the means of 
obtaining a better are wanting. 

The agnostic may say, “If there is a God, I do 
not know it, and there is no way by which I may find 
him out,” and he may be correctly reporting his 
materialistic philosophy (since spiritual things are 
spiritually discerned); but in so saying he is con- 
tradicting every expression of instinctive desire since 
the world began. The tiniest insect puts his boasted 
science to the blush. Think you that the all-wise 
Creator would plant in the soul this ceaseless longing 
for objective Reality and forget to build an approach 
to that intrinsic something? Shall the soul of man go 
hungry all its days and never be satisfied? The 
saints of all ages stand up in contradiction to such 
an idea. They bear witness against such a fallacy in 
terms of definite knowledge. They all testify to 
the fact that the human soul can and does know God, 
“‘whom to know aright is life eternal.’”’ That we 
may come into possession of this blessed Objective 
Reality, God in the richness of his wonderful love 
has drawn upon the resources of himself Incarnate, 
in consequence of which, through the Holy Spirit, 
saints find their hearts filled with such harmony 
with the infinite that they rejoice with certainty | 
that they are the children of God. The same soul 


358 A Gospel for the New Age 


who uttered the heart’s wail, “When shall I come 
and appear before God?” “My soul longeth, yea, 
even fainteth for the courts of the Lord,” also came 
to rejoice in the consciousness that ‘‘Jehovah is 
mine and I am his, and I shall dwell in the house of 
the Lord forever.” 


Gop’s WAYS ARE RATIONAL 


To implant in the soul of man an instinctive and 
insatiate spiritual desire for exalted relation which 
only God’s presence can give, and which can never 
be fully realized in this life, and deny the soul that 
presence and its full realizations would be as irra- 
tional as to equip a fish with an aquatic nature and 
furnish it no water in which to live. We must believe 
that the processes of nature are rational. On this 
assumption all faith rests and all science is built. 
Is it consistent with reason to suppose that nature, 
after long and laborious processes, has produced 
an intellectual creature who feels it his high duty to 
conform his life to eternal principles and to seek 
eternal ends, yet find himself limited to temporal con- 
ditions only? Was it rational to implant in the na- 
ture of man an instinctive longing after immortality 
if, as a matter of fact, he is only a creature of time? 
The chief question then is only the question of the 
reality and rationality of those impulses which man 
finds within himself. To implant in man a rational 
and moral nature and inspire him with a desire to 
seek after those spiritual ends which he cannot real- 
ize would be decidedly irrational and a waste of 
creative energy. But, as Aristotle has said, ‘‘God 
and nature never do anything in vain.” How vain 


Religion: The Instinct of Immortality 359 


would be man’s highest cravings and noblest aspira- 
tions if there were no immortality! Just as knowl- 
edge is beginning to ripen and his character to ma- 
ture, to collapse like a clod—what a vast waste of 
energy, what an irrational anticlimax! Such a deed 
would be totally unlike the doings of an all-wise 
Creator. 

Since man has the instinctive desire for a greater 
life in order to be happy, reason demands that great- 
er life, so that nature’s ways may be justified. In 
the light of this fact we may fully appreciate John 
Fiske’s remark when he says: “I believe in the im- 
mortality of the soul, not in the sense of believing 
in a demonstrated fact of science, but as a supreme 
act of faith in the reasonableness and rationality 
of God’s works.”’ 

All atheism is an affront and insult to the intel- 
ligence of humanity. Man finds himself endowed 
with an ethical sense and is conscious of a moral law 
at work within his soul. He feels at least that there 
are certain laws which should be obeyed, certain 
acts that are right and certain others that are wrong; 
and this relation he feels has to do with the future 
weal and woe of his soul; and he expects the conse- 
quent results of such actions as confidently as a 
spider expects his spun web to furnish him his break- 
fast. With this impulse strong in his soul, the right- 
minded man orders the course of his life accordingly 
and rejoices to live for a higher purpose, avoiding 
the wrong and cultivating those things which make 
for righteousness and truth. This he does at all 
hazards, seriously desiring to do right in the sight of 


360 A Gospel for the New Age 


God, feeling that “‘right is right, since God is God, 
and right the day must win.” 

But the atheist tells him that there is no such thing 
as “right in the sight of God, since there is no God, 
and no moral order in the world; that all good men’s 
serious endeavors are futile; that there is no such 
thing as the fruition of consequences, since life is but 
a chaos where blind chance rules; that the universe 
is a gigantic freak of frivolity.”” Now, what is all 
this but an affront to the intelligence and moral 
instincts of mankind? In the light of the philosophic 
principle of subjective cognitions and impulses and 
the answering objective realities, together with the 
moral order of the universe, such an abortion of life’s 
noble consequences would be next to the unthink- 
able. 


LIFE’s Most POWERFUL INSTINCT 


Let us consider life’s most powerful instinct 
and learn the lesson of its laws. Such an instinct 
is a part of us and points to unseen depths of our 
nature. That impulse is the instinct of self-preserva- 
tion, which in our temporal life has been called “‘the 
first law of nature,’’ because it is the highest law. 
This classification we all recognize as correct; and 
as a law it has held good since the days of Job, who 
felt the same when he said: “All that a man hath will 
he give for his life.” 

This instinct manifests itself in ways vastly be- 
yond the mere matter of personal safety in times of 
danger. A mere sense of fear would flee from danger; 
but this great instinct reaches beyond the immediate 
self and looks to the protection of those whom love 


Religion: The Instinct of Immortality 361 


claims as its own and provides for them when its 
own days are done. 


PERPETUATING THE SPECIES 


This impulse is recognized as the instinct of per- 
petuation of the species and is the strongest in- 
stinct known to nature. Though much abused at 
times, it reaches the sublime in heroic self-surrender 
in behalf of others. What skilled hunter has not 
witnessed this in the habits of animals having the 
care of their young? Animals such as the deer, that 
are naturally very shy, will linger in gunshot reach 
when a young fawn is hid near by. A mother quail 
will often feign lameness and hobble away, pretend- 
ing to be unable to fly and scarcely able to walk, 
decoying the hunter away from her nestlings that 
are unable to fly, but secreted somewhere near by, 
for whose safety she exposes herself to danger and 
possible death. Where is there a nobler impulse in 
nature? Yet we see it daily in the entire invest- 
ment of parents for the protection and well-being 
of their families or in the patriot who would make 
the “supreme sacrifice’ for his country. We 
recognize the heroic in his beautiful patriotism or in 
the mother who immolates herself on the family 
altar without looking far enough to discover the 
most wonderful and powerful instinct back of such 
deeds—the selfless impulse, the highest of which 
humanity is capable. This is the supreme act of 
love, the sublime principle of our Christianity. 

Viewed from a human standpoint, self-preserva- 
tion may seem the “greatest law of nature,” but 
when viewed from the spiritual hilltop, where shall 


362 A Gospel for the New Age 


we find terms to describe such nobleness of life and 
character? Of such our Saviour said, “He that 
would lose his life shall save it’”—not only save his 
soul life, but the life, natural and spiritual, of thou- 
sands of others. This is the law of propaganda in 
all religious effort. By it timid men and frail women 
have overpowered the most hostile heathen; by the 
same spirit “‘pacifists’’? have lifted belligerent na- 
tions out of their barbarism up into civilization and 
prosperous life. By it our blessed Lord chose to lift 
up and redeem a lost world. Men of mercenary 
minds are amazed that the apostles and other earn- 
est Christians should give themselves to a cause 
incurring such hardships and often costing them 
their lives. They do not fathom St. Paul’s thought 
when he says: “I am crucified with Christ; never- 
theless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” 
By such self-surrender he not only finds eternal life 
for himself, but also states the law by which Christ’s 
kingdom was founded at the beginning and is pushed 
to earth’s remotest bounds, and myriads of souls have 
entered it to find spiritual life here and hereafter to 
all eternity. This is the very climax of the religious 
instinct, the impulse of spiritual self-surrender for 
the salvation and eternal well-being of others. In 
such a paradox is found the strongest life dynamic 
known, the investment of faith, and spiritual propa- 
ganda which in its highest becomes the foretoken 
of immortality—a power which we may have felt 
and which has held us true to our soul’s best, with- 
out our ever having known its source or fullness of 
meaning. 

Far truer than we have thought, perhaps, is the 


Religion: The Instinct of Immortality 363 


fact that every religious aspiration and better im- 
pulse is but an instinctive effort of the soul to rise 
toward an immortal existence, and to realize by 
anticipation something of the meaning of that Reali- 
ty for which it has so strangely longed. Drawing 
nearer and still nearer to the source of this religious 
reality, the soul receives increasingly a new power 
and is transformed into a “new creature: old things 
are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” 
Such an experience awakens in the soul new realiza- 
tions, new ideals, and new hopes. He not only feels 
an insistent impulse to push forward to the land of 
the skies, but he feels a confident expectation of that 
blessed estate. With a habit born of long affiliation 
with things spiritual, the soul finds itself involuntari- 
ly reaching out in quest of an abode beyond the 
bounds of time and space and better suited to its 
nature than anything the earth can afford. “He 
seeks a city which hath foundations, whose builder 
and maker is God.” 

The truly devout soul finds it beyond his ability 
to question the promptings of his religious instincts 
or the reality of a future state. Said the great 
apostle: “‘We know that if our earthly house of this 
tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of 
God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the 
heavens.”’ Such was the instinctive confidence of 
soul polarity. To deny the Christian this at life’s 
close, not allowing him to realize that supreme de- 
sire, but find his expectations a fading dream, would 
be the most stupendous delusion and fraud in all 
the universe. But we know that the universe is not 


364 A Gospel for the New Age 


built upon the basis of a fraud. Nay, but there is 
no fraud. If life has any realities, this is one. 

After having centered all his soul’s expectations 
on this one hope and on reaching life’s evening hour, 
never did the sky redden with a surer promise of a 
fair to-morrow than is the instinctive assurance which 
is aglow in the heart of him who looks out into the 
unknown future with never a cloud in the sky and 
not a storm to disturb the serene seas. No cater- 
pillar ever crept into his finished crysalis cell and 
fell to sleep with surer sense of a safe transition to a 
higher state than he feels who, “sustained and 
soothed by an unfaltering trust, wraps the drapery 
of his couch about him and lies down to pleasant 
dreams,” ready in some fair land to be greeted, 
“‘Good morning?!’’ 

But whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, 
This longing after immortality? 

’Tis the divinity that stirs within us; 

’Tis Heaven itself that points out a hereafter 
And intimates eternity to man.? 

*‘Life’s mysteries all lead somewhere. The 
footprints of its myriads of wayfarers all point out- 
ward; nowhere can we find a returning trail. It is 
for the hope of that which lies at the end of the trail 
that we endure the hardships and difficulties of the 
journey. Humanity’s great goals are farther than the 
earth. From some hilltop they take to the skies. 
Heaven is the trail’s end. Heaven and God, happi- 
ness and peace, and home forever—it is true!’’? 

2Joseph Addison. 


«Elements of Personal Religion,’? Mitchell. (Methodist 
Book Concern.) 


Religion: The Instinct of Immortality 365 


They who in this mundane life have, like children, 
been engaged with earthly toys—she with her dolls 
and he with his fancied wars and mimic kings and 
princes—will, in that world so often foretokened, 
lay such toys aside forever and take up those reali- 
ties which furnished the stimuli of our greatest spirit- 
-ual impulse—the master instinct fulfilled at last— 
immortal life attained, that for which mundane life 
was planned and perfected! 


* Ae 


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Aiea a4) 
Ly at yi 

Ae ri Vt i rf 
eee CA As 

Pi? a4 dd File 


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Wes i] 
+ 

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DUNG OY 


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CHAPTER XVI 


LED OF THE SPIRIT: THE WAY OF SAFETY 


‘‘Thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is 
the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and 
when ye turn to the left.” —Isaiah xxx. 21. 


“‘Tf the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.” 
—Matthew xv. 14 
‘“‘Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light 


of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, 
but shall have the light of life.’—John viit. 12. 


CHAPTER XVI 
LED OF THE SPIRIT: THE WAY OF SAFETY 


THE leadership of the Spirit is a moral necessity 
in the Christian life. The Holy Spirit is to Chris- 
tianity what a general is to an organized army—the 
nucleus and guide of the entire body. For unity of 
life and action some such means is necessary. Our 
Saviour anticipated all this and amply provided for 
the need. He saw that his departure from earth 
would leave his disciples, who looked to him alone 
as having ‘‘the words of life,” as sheep not having 
a shepherd. And without the guiding Holy Spirit 
such would be the condition of Christians in all ages 
of Christendom. 

At a most critical moment Jesus said to his dis- 
ciples: “It is expedient for you that I go away: for 
if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto 
you. . . . When he, the Spirit of truth, is come, 
he will guide you into all truth. . . . The Com- 
forter, which is the Holy Spirit, whom the Father 
will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, 
and bring all things to your remembrance, whatso- 
ever I have said unto you. . . . Howbeit when he, 
the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into 
SILAPUGIA) we. shatdale He shall glorify me: for he shall 
receive of mine, and show it unto you.’' Here we 
have three essentials to the Christian life: (1) The 
Comforter sent of God, (2) the Spirit of Truth and 


24 (369) 


370 A Gospel for the New Age 


revealer of the things of Jesus, and (8) the Guide to 
all truth. All these are absolutely essential to 
Christianity; nor can we imagine how without them 
there can be any such thing as a real Christian ex- 
perience or victory in the religious life. 

It is the guidance and tuition of the Spirit which 
give to Christianity its moral life and prestige in 
the world. This leadership, when truly followed, 
leads to spiritual victory; but when ignored or dis- 
obeyed certain defeat follows. Its repudiation is the 
real secret of the fruitlessness and defeat which have 
at times only troubled the Church in her illustrious 
career. 

ESSENTIAL TO UNITY 


A general is not more essential to the morale of 
an army than the leadership of the Spirit is to the 
accomplishment of that excellence for which our 
Saviour so devoutly prayed—namely: “That they 
may all be one, as thou, Father, art in me and I in 
thee, that they also may be one in us.” This being 
one in Christ never was designed to suppress our 
individuality or take away our liberty. Christ by 
no means intended to bring us all to be as so many 
cogs in a great wheel, all exactly alike, thinking and 
acting alike and driven by the same power. The 
accomplishment of such a fact would be to make our 
piety to be a vast prison house for souls. Yet in 
how many instances the attempt has been made to 
reduce all Christianity to just this routine, by dress- 
ing Church members in a kind of uniform, having 
them all try to think, act, and believe alike. This 
attempt has been back of much of the oppression 
and persecution of Christians; yet this kind of 


Led of the Spirit: The Way of Safety 371 


“unity” is at variance with the laws of nature in her 
infinite variety; and to try to force this upon man- 
kind would be to attempt the impossible and defeat 
the plans of God. The charm of life lies in its wide 
variety of expression. In a world of moral probation 
every man must think, act, and decide for himself. 
Upon this ground alone can one be himself and glorify 
God. 

When led of the Spirit it is possible for us all to be 
one in Christ Jesus—one in heart, sympathy, and 
affection; one in fidelity to him who said: “‘A new 
commandment I give unto you, That ye love one 
another; as I have loved you.” When filled and 
swayed by the great power of that love, our in- 
dividual characters will acquire a Christlikeness 
known in any land or age. Kings and subjects, 
princes and paupers, Orientals and Westerners— 
all alike have the same excellence of character when 
truly obedient to the Spirit and when they walk in 
the footprints of the Master. 

When led of patriotism this is not the case. 
Hindu patriotism calls for the worship of ancestors, 
although certain classes are not allowed to do this. 
Hence the development of caste, which divides men 
of the same nationality as distincitvely as if they 
were men of different blood. Being led of science, 
the spirit of learning made Greece hate Egypt and 
Egypt hate Greece. Being led of the sword, the 
spirit of mastery made Rome the ruler and tyrant 
of the world and militarism for centuries the dread 
of civilization; it also bred hate which smoldered like 
the sputterings of a volcano and repeatedly burst 


ote A Gospel for the New Age 


forth in a world conflagration and nation-consuming 
conquests. 

Following the lead of the Holy Spirit has given the 
world an awakening consciousness that ‘we are all 
of one blood,” born of the same spiritual Heavenly 
Father, and also that to love one another is the goal 
of humanity’s highest hope. 


THE “‘HOLY” SPIRIT 


He who thinks, with J. Agar Beet, that ‘“‘the 
Holy Spirit is the animating principle of all things 
which have life” has yet to learn the meaning of 
the word ‘‘holy’’—that which leads to piety and the 
spiritual uplift of the soul by developing Christ- 
likeness in mankind. The men of this age have 
much to say of an impersonal Force at work in the 
world impelling mankind onward to the haleyon age, 
more intellectual and having a nearer approach to 
nature. We all gladly herald such a Power and 
recognize that Spirit in whom we ‘“‘live, move, and 
have our being’’; but only on certain conditions can 
we truly say that we are led of the Spirit; and that is 
when the trend is toward righteousness and ‘“‘the 
mind that was in Christ Jesus” is also found in us. 
That was the mind of self-surrender, which would let 
go equality with God to save a lost world. When 
men forget this, then the trouble begins; then they 
strive after worldly glory, become bigoted and in- 
tolerant. Under such delusion there is no telling to 
what degenerate depths men may descend. Just 
this unholy ambition and corruption in the Church 
of the times gave occasion to such merciless infidel 
attacks as came from Voltaire, Ingersoll, and others, 


Led of the Spirit: The Way of Safety 373 


mistaking the weakness and folly of men for the 
teachings of Christ. All this Antichrist, however, 
which usurps the throne of Christ, setting up the 
wills of men for the will of God, deserves just all 
such fiery denunciation, and even more. The de- 
mand must be made that the world’s progress come 
from the Holy Spirit and not from designing men. 


TRY THE SPIRIT 


False prophets, worshiping God with strange fire, 
have been the menace of Christianity from the be- 
ginning. The early disciples met with them in such 
men as Simon Magus and others who would make 
gain out of credulous people; hence the Apostle John 
wrote: ‘Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits 
whether they are of God; because many false proph- 
ets are gone out into the world.’”’ Now, this caution 
was intended to apply to teachers and preachers, 
and is most applicable even in this our day. But 
this testing the spirit should apply not only to 
others, but to our own spirits as well. In the matter 
of religious reality, the citadel of our own souls must 
be kept loyal to Christ. Men sometimes do some 
very foolish things, claiming to be led of the Spirit. 
Yet to know the will of God and to be led by his 
Spirit is the great essential in the Christian life. 
There is no one rule by which we may know this 
great secret, yet to know it and be led by it should be 
the one consuming desire of the soul. Not a great 
while ago one would hear the expression, “‘the mind 
of the Spirit.’”” While this expression may be. used 
as the merest cant, it should carry with it a world of 
meaning. The “mind of the Spirit” for us means 


‘374 A Gospel for the New Age 


our frame of mind when completely dominated by 
the indwelling Holy Spirit and led by him. Do we 
no longer need for God to point out for us the more 
excellent way? Are the kaleidoscopic impulses of the 
human heart a safe pilot on life’s tempestuous sea? 
How can we distinguish between the good and the 
bad in the multitude of alternatives which arise 
and tell which leads to safety and which to ruin? 
If God has established a polestar in holy living to 
indicate the safe haven, why not let its pull be the 
polarity of our souls? Why lie around like masses of 
brainless jellyfish waiting to be bumped into this 
or that line of life by a mere coincidence—“ yielding 
to the situation,”’ as modern psychologists say? 

This “‘trying the Spirit’”’ should be subjected to the 
severest test of the Scriptures, of self-commitment 
to God, of profound faith and the heartiest “‘ waiting 
upon the Lord” to do his will. Even then much 
must be left to the human will and discretion. In 
no case will God remove the issues out of the hands 
of men. 

THE SOURCE OF GREAT ISSUES 

This being “‘led of the Spirit”’ has been the source 
of innumerable great issues and great victories which 
have gilded the hilltops of history with imperishable 
glory. It may have been “yielding to a situation”’ 
that thrilled the disciples at Pentecost and made 
them new men full of strange power. But will not 
some one tell the origin of that “situation”? which 
enabled them to “turn the world upside down,” 
and whence it came? In those stormy days Paul 
went up to the feast at Jerusalem, not knowing what 
awaited him there, but he said, ‘‘I go bound of the 


Led of the Spirit: The Way of Safety 375 


Spirit’; and that same “bound” led him to Rome, 
there to “‘stand before Cesar also,’”’ and to plant in 
the West the seeds of a gospel which ultimately 
captured all Europe. Historians tell us that after 
much pleading before courts Columbus did succeed 
in finding one to help him fit out his small fleet of 
three ships to find a near way to the Indies. But 
never did men embark upon a more uncertain voyage 
or feel themselves more spellbound of the Spirit. 
With their friends on land pleading upon their 
knees for the protecting and guiding hand of God, 
Columbus, in the peak hour of religious heroism, 
set sail adown a stream, he knew not whither, to 
stumble upon the Western Hemisphere—a far more 
gold-bearing and eventful land than India ever was. 
Can this be called a mere accident in human events? 
The emigration of the Plymouth Fathers and Hu- 
guenots from their native lands rather than submit 
to coercion and Catholic persecution, to St. Bar- 
tholomew’s day massacre, and to the fires of Smith- 
field, may seem to some a “‘yielding to a situation’ — 
a giving away at the point of least resistance—but 
it would have been most difficult to have convinced 
the fathers thus. They came to the New World 
confidently believing that they were ‘“‘led of the 
Spirit”; and while others came to America, North 
and South, to find gold, they came to find God and 
build a kingdom for him; and they and their de- 
scendants have written their convictions large in 
the generic laws and institutions of our land. 

What was it astir in the hearts of the evangelicals 
of the English-speaking world in the eighteenth 
century which put them to reading the Bible in 


376 A Gospel for the New Age 


spite of dungeon and halter and started the field 
preaching and special revival efforts which converted 
thousands and erected that bulwark of righteous 
thinking which turned back the wave of Revolution 
flowing in from France? Was it ‘“‘yielding to a 
situation’? when Jonathan Edwards—tall, lean, seri- 
‘ous, and uninviting as a speaker, reading slowly 
but earnestly his terrible sermons to his Northamp- 
ton congregation—started a wave of religious ex- 
citement which swept over the entire Connecticut 
valley and, being taken up by George Whitefield and 
his coworkers, rolled over the entire Colonial America, 
even down the Southern seacoast? Was there not 
evidence of the leading of the Holy Spirit in all this? 

How else explain much in the trend of history? 
The “lure of gold” will not suffice; the ‘‘instinct of 
adventure”’ is too meager; the “‘spirit of the age”’ 
was not an adequate cause. All these are but sur- 
face indications of a more powerful agency. Among 
religious men the impulse was far different. Tell 
us, ye materialistic scientists, what great power drew 
into its mighty wave the bravest, sanest, and holiest 
men of those times and sent them across trackless 
seas, over lofty mountains, into dense and dangerous 
forests, and into the wilds of the West, there to 
plant the standard of the Cross on the outposts of an 
advancing civilization? These men went feeling 
called of God and led of the Spirit; so they did the 
heroic deeds of their history. Shall we traduce their 
memory, impeach their sanity, and rob them of the 
glory they achieved—the most illustrious in all 
history—by applying to their record the tests of a 
colorless philosophy of to-day and say that they 


Led of the Sptrit: The Way of Safety 3877 


were not heroes, not men of action and character, 
but only entities tumbled about by circumstances as 
Socrates tumbled his tub? Far be it from us to rob 
them and the world of the one thing which gave them 
prestige and made their times memorable to all time. 
That one thing was the conviction that they were led 
of the Spirit of God. 

How explain the movements of modern history 
which were strictly religious? It might be possible 
and profitable to trace the hand of God in many of 
the marvels of the times that are of a secular nature. 
The achievements in geological discoveries, in scien- 
tific feats, in the spread of liberty and a popular 
form of government, have all had behind them 
a “power which made for righteousness.” The 
beacon lights of all such achievements have been 
men like Kepler, Isaac Newton, Agassiz, Faraday, 
“Chinese” Gordon, Livingstone, and even Thomas 
Edison—true men whose profound desire was to 
follow the leadership of the “spirit of Truth,” and 
they attribute their success to this one source alone. 
Let it not be forgotten that after America’s great 
President proclaimed noonday prayers by all loyal 
American citizens for the guidance and protection 
of Almighty God for the nation and her armies in the 
World War, not a single time after that epochal 
July day in 1918 did our Star-Spangled Banner ever 
droop or our advancing khaki-clad boys take a back- 
ward step or hesitate till victory had given the war- 
weary world the trophy of sweet peace once more. 
Glorious truth! But the problem at hand is to re- 
establish the truth of the leadership of the Spirit in 
things religious in the daily life of Christians. Not 


378 A Gospel for the New Age 


without this, but with it, are the realities of the 
Christian religion at all to be experienced. 


THE CLOUDS WITHDRAW 


That ‘‘prayer makes the darkened clouds with- 
draw”’ is more than a line of poetry; it is a dynamic 
fact. Under the spell of prayer how the gloom has 
lifted in the crucial hours of religious progress! 
Since the guidance of the Spirit is generic to Chris- 
tianity, plotted as an integral part of its life, would 
it not seem strange and foolish to attempt to ignore 
it in religious experience? What attitude did our 
Saviour assume toward it, and did he place it among 
the actual values in his estimate of life’s factors? 
How often during the progress of his teachings did 
he say, “Tell no man till the Son of Man shall come 
in his glory,” and “Tarry ye at Jerusalem till ye are 
endued from power from on high.” Why all this 
precaution? There was the greatest wisdom in it 
all. He was imparting some of the most essential 
and delicate truths in religion, which were ultimately 
to be passed on to the waiting world, and everything 
depended upon correctness of repetition. The 
Master did not want Christianity to “go astray from 
its birth, speaking lies’; and he knew that if men 
were to tell of the soul’s redemptive joys they must 
know it themselves. Whenever an attempt was 
otherwise made a religious muddle has followed. 
So the injunction was: “‘Tarry at Jerusalem, wait 
till my plans are completed, receive the outpouring 
of the Holy Spirit. Thrilled and made fit by this, 
you may go forth to witness for me and my king- 
dom.” That was a spiritual kingdom of great 


Led of the Spirit: The Way of Safety 379 


activity, as subsequent events revealed; and ener- 
getic action without safe guidance would lead to 
folly, to fanaticism. To speak for high heaven, God 
must instruct. In order to make progress in the 
redemption of mankind it was most essential then, 
as to-day, to be led of the Spirit; and without it 
there has never yet been made substantial and abid- 
ing progress in religion. All that pageantry of march- 
ing in the history of the Church, with the Cross as a 
symbol and the sword as a means of victory, may 
have indeed been a ‘“‘conquest,” but in place of 
of Christianizing paganism it only paganized the 
Church, doing more to defeat the progress of real 
Christianity than all the powers of evil otherwise 
combined, misguiding the trustful people and 
drenching the earth with saintly blood. 

Blinded by sins and burdened by defeat, how many 
times the Church has gone to her knees in penitent 
pleading for the guidance of the Spirit, only to be 
lifted up into strength and to go forth unto joyous 
victory. When rightly accomplished the results 
have never been otherwise. Since the work is God’s, 
is it anything but wise to expect him to be the Pilot 
on life’s troubled seas? 


AGE OF GREAT ACTIVITY 


The accumulation of vast wealth, a greatly en- 
larged membership, and other stored-up forces, all 
acting in their normal Christian capacity, give our 
times a right to be called an age of great religious 
activity. All the issues of the times point in that 
direction. A better grasp of religious truth implies 
just this. The major work of Christianity is the 


380 A Gospel for the New Age 


development of personality; and wherever person- 
ality is, there is creative activity. Then the task 
at present of rebuilding the chaotic world demands 
the greatest energy of mind, soul, and spirit. The 
world’s finances must be redeemed or ruin will 
everywhere follow. We must Christianize the pagan 
world all about us, or it will paganize us. We must 
do or die; such is the law of life. 

But in the sea swell of demands or opportunities, 
in religious matters as everywhere else, how great 
the danger encountered, how easy to get out of the 
great sea lane, off the track, and plunge the ship upon 
the treacherous rocks by mistaking the activities 
of the Church for religion itself. This is the fore- 
most menace to Christianity to-day. The criterion 
of the day is not purity of heart and motive, not 
Christlikeness in character, but Church activity 
in consummating great enterprises, building great 
churches and raising vast sums of money. Nobody 
now ever reports the great piety of the people; it is 
always the “putting over” the big interest that is 
told—as if putting an army of a million or two across 
the Atlantic was the big job of the war, in comparison 
with which the nation’s morale and the bravery of 
the men in arms were a mere incident. 

Must he be condemned as a “‘prophet of evil” 
who would dare suggest that there might lurk an 
element of danger in all this marvelous activity? 
Overconfident souls pass on, thinking that all is well 
and that the Holy Spirit is leading, not dreaming of 
the mixture of evil that may be in it. But what are 
the lessons from history? One does not have to 
look far for an illustrious precedent. Take a case 


Led of the Spirit: The Way of Safety 381 


from French history. During the reign of Louis 
XIV there swept over France a wave of royal popu- 
larity and national extravagance. Among other 
things there was a great building wave, at which 
time many national buildings were erected or en- 
larged. MMansard, the royal architect, was a man of 
wonderful designing skill and fond of magnificent 
display. During his administration immense sums 
were spent on the Royal Palace at Versailles? and 
other buildings which are still the delight of admir- 
ing eyes. Mansard was given full sway with his 
“‘magnificent buildments” as he called them; but 
all this magnificence was very expensive, and the 
money must be wrung out of the tax-burdened 
people. ‘“‘The millions for buildments,’” together 
with other extravagances—considered no doubt the 
evidence of great prosperity—resulted in a nation- 
al mutiny and wave of royal unpopularity, thus 
strengthening the republican sentiment, arousing the 
Huguenot element, and giving rise to a power which 
ultimately had to be reckoned with. 

While this architectural extravagance may have 
been a mere coincidence, it gave rise to a wave such 
as the nation had never before known. This, to- 
gether with other royal extravagances, in the opinion 
of M. Guizot, the historian, brought on the French 
Revolution, and later the Reign of Terror, when 
every man carried his dagger under his belt, brother 


*This historic palace, where in 1871 William of Prussia was 
made Emperor of Germany and where the Treaty of Peace 
after the World War was signed, was built at a cost of $280,- 
000,000, and is a marvel of architectural skill, extremely 
picturesque and beautiful. 


382 A Gospel for the New Age 


feared to meet brother in the street, and the earth 
ran red with the blood of the guillotine. 


STARTING THE REFORMATION 


The building of St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, 
together with other magnificent cathedrals scattered 
over Europe, oppressed the Church for a thousand 
years. The raising of money for such purposes gave 
rise to such scandalous schemes as the sale of “‘in- 
dulgences”’ to sin. This being done in Wittenberg, 
Germany, by one John Tetzel so aroused the ire of 
the friar Martin Luther that he declared, ‘“‘I shall 
beat a hole in his drum’’; which he at once proceeded 
to do, thus uncorking the volcano of the Reformation 
which eventually broke the strength of the Catholic 
Church and dispelled its charm over men as nothing 
else has ever done, and from which it can never 
recover. This strife, lasting four hundred years, may 
be traced directly to the scandalous schemes to 
raise money to meet the extravagances of the Church 
in buildings and other papal follies. 

Could all this by any possible figure of speech be 
called the “lead of the Spirit’? Are not such waves 
rather indicative of the schemes of ambitious men 
looking to their self-glorification and not to the glory 
of God? Such schemes have often done the Church 
great harm, and may do our age untold injury. 


THE PRESENT ‘‘GREAT MOVEMENTS’”’ 


It cannot be denied that in the constructive 
program of to-day there are to be found conditions 
which give occasion for alarm and cause many con- 
scientious, clear-sighted souls sadness of heart. 


Led of the Spirit: The Way of Safety 383 


The Spirit-led Church of necessity will have many 
and vast interests in hand looking to the advancement 
of the kingdom and the edification of believers. The 
apostles had all these things to look after, and our 
giving attention to them puts us in the direct apos- 
tolic line. Yet these things should be secondary. 
But what are the real conditions to a large extent 
in Church affairs to-day? Is it not a fact that we 
have, unconsciously enough, allowed the material 
interests of the Church to usurp the mind of the 
people? The “great interests” of the Church are 
absorbing the interests of the authorities to such an 
extent as to overshadow the one great purpose for 
which the Church exists. The passionate desire 
to save men—the conversion of souls and the edi- 
fication of believers—has given place to the promo- 
tion of great interests and to the “‘putting over” of 
great financial “drives,” till the pastor has become 
primarily a “promoter of movements rather than 
the herald of the passion of Christ.”’ As a result, 
what wonder that the stamp of official efficiency 
is put upon the secular rather than the spiritual, and 
flaring financial reports are conditions of official 
preferment! 

Yet all this is for the advancement of the kingdom, 
some one will say, and ultimately for the salvation 
of souls. But may it not be possible in all this great 
material advancement for the Church to find herself 
where Samson was—powerless, because his God had 
forsaken him and he knew it,not? May there not be 
wisdom in the alarm some feel for the safety of the 
Church and the spiritual welfare of her constituency? 


384 A Gospel for the New Age 


Not TRUE TO THE GLEAM 


The greatest mystery of all is in the failure of 
many worthy souls to recognize and ring true to the 
gleam of the Holy Spirit in many of the advanced 
movements of Christian history. They see no 
“ouiding hand” in the advancement of learning 
in England in the sixteenth century; nor in the Age 
of Illuminism in France and Germany in the eight- 
eenth century; nor yet in the Missionary Movement 
of the nineteenth century and later. It is true that 
the eighteenth century movement led to a breaking 
away from the tryanny of the Roman Catholic 
Church and to the age of rationalism, giving the 
world such leaders in skeptical free thought as 
Voltaire, Bolingbroke, and Tom Paine—mere ac- 
cidents these in the transition from darkness to light. 
But that age also produced such world leaders as 
Samuel Johnson, the two Pitts, Wesley and White- 
field, Robert Hall and Benjamin Franklin, and not 
least, George Washington. Stalwart Christians were 
these all! During this century the Church took a 
bound forward as never before in all of her history, 
registering an increase of one hundred per cent in 
membership in eighty-five years, whereas it had 
required four hundred years to accomplish the pre- 
vious increase in like proportions. 


THE GREAT REVIVALS 


It was during this period that the great revivals 
sprang up, the most famous being the “great 
awakening’ in New England under the ministry 
of Jonathan Edwards. Following close on this 
came the great Kentucky meetings, which seemed to 


Led of the Spirit: The Way of Safety 385 


be freest of human agency or deliberate planning. 
The most historic of them all were those in Logan 
County, of which Peter Cartwright and others give 
a glowing account. In that county there was an 
abandoned section called ‘‘Rogues Harbor,”’ which 
lay in the backwoods then, to which only brave men 
with their lives in their hands would dare to go. The 
best of these were of pure Anglo-Saxon descent and 
of Scotch-Irish blood who had gone from Virginia, 
taking their families with them, many of whom were 
profoundly religious. The country was very fertile 
and promising, hence men of the most abandoned 
sort had settled there, and, as Cartwright says: 
“Refugees from almost all parts of the Union fled 
there to escape justice and punishment. Although 
there was law, it could not be executed, and society 
was in a desperate state. Murderers, horse thieves, 
highway robbers, and counterfeiters fled here un- 
til they combined and actually formed a majority. 
The honest and civil part of the citizens would 
prosecute these wretches; but they would swear 
each other clear. They really put all law at de- 
fiance and carried on such desperate violence and 
outrage that the honest part of the citizens were 
driven to the necessity of taking the law into their 
own hands under the name of ‘Regulators,’ such was 
the desperate state of things.” 

Here the great Kentucky revival began. In 1796 
there was invited to Logan County the very man for 
such a place—strong, fierce, with a thundering voice 
and terribly in earnest, yet full of holy zeal for souls 
and not afraid of man or devil. In his impassionate 
preaching, as Edwards used to say, “he shook them 

25 


386 A Gospel for the New Age 


over the pit of hell.” His hearers were in fear and 
trembling, they were in tears, till the one subject 
among them was the salvation of their souls. The 
tidings spread slowly over the county, and in 1799 
two brothers, the one a Presbyterian and the other a 
Methodist, named McGee, traveling through the 
country, turned aside to witness McGready’s strange 
work in Logan County. They saw and took part 
in a great sacramental service. At the close the 
people seemed unwilling to leave the church, and 
the brothers remained to address them. Of this, 
John McGee writes: “There was a solemn weeping 
all over the house. At length I rose up and exhorted 
them to let the Lord God Omnipotent reign in their 
hearts, to submit to him, and their souls should live. 
Many broke silence. A woman shouted tremendous- 
ly. I left the pulpit and went through the house 
shouting and exhorting with all possible ecstasy and 
energy; and the floor was soon covered with the slain 
of the Lord.” 3 

The people who had experienced this awakening 
went home, with their hearts burning, to tell what 
they had seen and communicate the news to others. 
Soon the whole State was in commotion. From a 
distance of forty, fifty, and even a hundred miles 
men traveled to the first camp meeting at the Gasper 
River, in the summer of 1800. They brought their 
families in covered wagons with food and bedding. 
The church was too small to hold the crowds, so 
the men made clearings in the forest, laying great 
trees in rows for seats. There they stayed from 
Friday till the close of the following week. On 
Saturday evening there was a giving away in hun- 


Led of the Spirit: The Way of Safety 387 


dreds to excitement and prostration. After this 
camp meetings became common. At Cane Ridge 
in August, 1801, it was estimated that there were 
twenty thousand present. 

The wave spread into all parts of the country, 
into North Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio, Pennsylvania, 
and westward as the migration went. While it 
lessened in force and much extravagance was in- 
dulged in at times, it became the stamp of revivals 
and is what the people mean by “the old-time 
religion.” It reformed and civilized some of the 
worst and wildest districts of our country. ‘“Care- 
less men and women were made earnest-minded, the 
bonds of evil that held thousands were broken, the 
abandoned were purified, and ruffians were tamed. 
Places where life and property were not safe became 
the happy homes of Christian men and women.” 
Reckless and wicked men became honest and faith- 
ful Christians. It was in this wild country and 
amid these conditions that the Cumberland Presby- 
terian Church was born. 

Yet such a writer as George Stevens in theorizing 
over such movements, following the opinions of men 
like Max Nordau’ and Gustave le Bon, classes such 
as “mass movements,” and while recognizing their 
religious value, has nothing to say about any leader- 
ship of the Spirit. It is difficult to see how such 
waves can rightly be classed as “‘mass movements” 
when the pull was felt by individuals a hundred 
miles apart and long before they were drawn into a 
mass. True, there is such a thing possible to human- 


Psychology of the Christian Soul,” Stevens, pp. 199 ff. 
(George H. Doran Co.) 


388 A Gospel for the New Age 


ity as “‘mass movement,”’ manifested in a mob or 
the charge of an attacking army. We call the im- 
pulse which took so many to California in 1849 
“the gold fever,’ and the wild unruliness of a 
murderous crowd “‘the mob spirit.” Then would 
it not be consistent in us to call that spirit which 
inclines men to seek righteousness by coming to- 
gether in religious gatherings “the Holy Spirit’’? 
If we ignore this Bible term to designate certain 
religious impulses, whose dictionary of terms shall 
we consult to find the right word to tell what we 
mean? Why thus deny the Holy Spirit in such 
epochal movements and in our own religious life? 

Doubtless such silence concerning the leadership 
of the Spirit is due to a desire to be exceedingly 
accurate or “scientific,” and rather than be called 
“unscientific” the producing cause of a great move- 
ment is entirely overlooked. The eyes of men are 
veiled and the hand of God hidden from view by 
the influence of the materialistic scientist who 
knows nothing of the movings of the Spirit of God. 
Here his science does not apply. How reduce to 
scientific formula the fact that a young Chinaman 
recently walked one hundred miles to be taught the 
“Jesus religion”? Or the facts of the life of Joseph 
Hardy Neesima, who came all the way from Japan, 
his native land, to Boston at his own expense to 
learn of Christianity, that he might return and 
become the benefactor of his own needy race? 
Who can read such facts and deny the leadership of 
the Spirit? But God is not confined to missionary 
history. 

In this our day of complexed and confused issues, 


Led of the Spirit: The Way of Safety 889 


when all the world lacks a leader and none dare say, 
“This is the way; walk ye in it,”” what a time to say, 
“‘Guide me, O thou great Jehovah!” We grope and 
blunder and go into religious defeat all because we 
fail to ask that we may receive, to seek that we may 
find, and to knock that the door may be opened unto 
us. Where now the sky is overshadowed, the way 
dark, and the grape harvest blighted in the gloom 
of an arctic night, there might be, under the leader- 
ship of the Spirit, a radiant sky, an Eshcol grape 
harvest amid the songs of the Beulah land of prom- 
ise. 
WHEN THE WAY Is DARK 


Let none presume, because the path is not always 
bright with the sunlight, that the Spirit does not 
lead us there. 


‘Into each life some rain must fall, 
Some days must be dark and dreary.” 


There is always night somewhere. When the night 
falls and the way is dark, how natural to think that 
God has forgotten us. Yet everything depends upon 
our fidelity at the moment. The Spirit led Jesus 
into the wilderness to be tempted; and being true 
at every assault of the tempter, that same Spirit led 
him through the temptations out into the sunshine 
of eternal victory and gave the world a Redeemer 
who could claim its confidence, saying: “ Be of good 
courage, I have overcome the world.”’ God builds 
upon just this faithful following of the Spirit, and 
the ‘‘foundation of God standeth sure’’; all else must 
fail. 

Darkness is a medium of God’s revelation of him- 


390 A Gospel for the New Age 


self. We struggle unto victory; and we measure the 
triumphs by the trials. There are lightning flashes 
struck at midnight surpassing far the noonday 
glare. The celestial glory were not known but for the 
darkness of the night. So with our life. There is 
somewhere in every life a dark ‘‘valley and shadow 
of death” through which all must pass. We know 
of no life all sunshine. There are sorrows on every 
hand. The night came down on a raging battle in 
the Valley of Virginia during the Civil War, and 
Stonewall Jackson’s men were commanded to “rest 
on their arms.” The rain was falling, the night was 
dark, and by the lightning flashes the horse tracks 
could be seen full of water. A bright fire was ablaze 
in a near-by farmhouse, and one of the men said: 
“This is hard. Here we are lying in this mud and 
‘Old Jack’ over there by that bright fire.” The 
General spoke up: ‘‘No, boys, here I am in your 
midst.’”? Was there any wonder that his men trusted 
and followed him as they did? Never is the Spirit 
more really with us to lead and to sustain than 
when the hour is darkest. It is then the world sees 
the reality of our religion. Whether we realize it or 
not, God is near; then our faith comes into play. 
In his darkest hour, destitute, forsaken, and sick, Job 
lifted up his soul and said, ‘‘ Though he slay me, yet 
will I trust him,” and in that hour established 
his integrity and his name forever. That was 
triumph, his sublime moment, for which the whole 
story was written! Previous to that hour God was 
unseen. After that Job could affirm: “I have heard 
of thee by the hearing of the ear; but now mine eye 
seeth thee.” If one wished to get facts on the hu- 


Led of the Spirit: The Way of Safety 391 


manness of Jesus, and at the same time find proof 
that “‘he was in all points tempted like as we are,” 
let him but stand at the foot of the Cross and hear 
the dying Saviour say: ‘‘My God, my God, why 
hast thou forsaken me?” Yet in that mysterious 
hour, as the keystone act of redemption was being 
accomplished, God had not forsaken his “well- 
beloved Son.” But for that season of darkness man- 
kind would have had no redemption. For this 
tragic act on the Cross the whole of the life of Christ 
was planned. Had he failed, had Job failed, or if 
we fail in the dark your, all were lost. 

The way of the Spirit is not necessarily a royal path 
or a “‘flowery bed of ease.”’ God has difficult tasks 
for his people to accomplish. Men of the finest 
mettle welcome the challenge to the noble task, no 
matter how difficult or perilous. Christ’s appeal 
was to the heroic. He spoke of a cross, of self- 
denial, of hardness. Where the Spirit leads Christ is 
ever, and in his footsteps is the way of life, the 
blessed way of safety. 


VICTORIOUS RESIGNATION 


To the pilgrim’s vision the world is aptly typified 
by the Biblical figure of the ‘‘troubled sea of life.’ 
God’s hosts all journey aboard the ‘Old Ship of 
Zion.”’ This of course subjects them to seafaring 
rules and to the limitations of the vessel. But that 
does not make them galley slaves or prisoners. They 
are not tools to anybody’s tryanny; but free souls 
traveling thus from choice. They deliberately chose 
their destination; they selected their good ship, 
picked their company, paid the fare, and set sail. 


392 A Gospel for the New Age 


This of course fixed the conditions across the sea; 
they feel safe under the guidance of their great 
Pilot, who can land them where they could not 
safely go alone; hence they are contented and happy. 

In the Christian life there is no slavish resignation 
to tyrannical conditions. We are not in bondage, 
but are free souls, preferring to do that which is 
right and guard with care the “passion for the 
better” within us. The true soul feels that he must 
affirm what he loves and what he thinks is right and 
true. At times to resign oneself to silence is a 
coward’s part, and to do so would be to let slip the 
erown of life. The glory of resignation is lost to 
those who mask under the cloak of indolence of 
mind and prefer “peace at any price’’—the per- 
petual capitulation to obstacles and threats, the 
passive humor which never resents being called 
“good-natured.” Such a spirit could never con- 
quer the raging sea of life or redeem our troubled 
times. To be content with the status quo, the un- 
satisfactory state of things, fearing to be called a 
“calamity howler,” and to drift with the multitude, 
preferring to be in line with respectable conven- 
tionality, is to show oneself to be of slave’s fiber. 
It is a “lap of luxury” to be satisfied with a crown of 
thorns. 

Who dare to charge that Jesus taught any such a 
spirit or organized any such religion? He who does 
so is tragically in error and far from being a rightful 
expounder of its Founder. Jesus was an ever-ready 
antagonist to evil’s bondage, a bow always strung, 
indomitable, fired with the hope of some day van- 
quishing evil and transforming the earth into the 


Led of the Spirit: The Way of Safety 393 


kingdom of God. He himself likens his spirit to 
leaven, a most potent and energetic force, never at 
rest till the whole lump becomes leavened. His 
spirit never makes a compromise with anybody or 
anything. Incorruptible, he never lowered his sub- 
lime ideals to the level of egoisms or the world re- 
signed to its own meanness. No effort seemed to 
him too great or conflict too sore; no suffering ever 
made him flinch. And since his entrance into history, 
he has been the inspirer of all uprisings for liberty, 
fraternity, and light. Victory for truth has always 
been accomplished by those who cculd not be re- 
signed to conditions offensive to their convictions. 


THE SPIRIT LEADS TO CONQUEST 


Our present age is a “field in need of clearing’’— 
nay, rather, a jungle beneath whose tangled mass 
lies untold wealth of soil and mineral deposits. 
Some shun the drudgery of clearing the ground and 
will not attack; others rebel and denounce, drifting 
hither and thither; while the rest do accept the task 
and attack with pick and ax, with flame and force. 
The spoils attract the “grafter,’ and his name is 
legion. While now there may seem the tumult and 
din of battle, and all confusion in the jungle depths, 
there shall come a time when a continent shall smile 
as a trophy to those who would not be satisfied 
with camouflage or a chaos of dross, but demanded 
reality and learned of Him whose followers are the 
rightful heirs of life’s victories and true joys. Like 
all true worth, such victories will cost immensely, but 
will be worth the price. In all such conquests the 
Spirit leads the way and sure triumph follows. 


394 A Gospel for the New Age 


It is a fact that the Spirit never makes an apostle 
or hero out of a corrupt or cowardly soul. Martyrs 
and reformers have in all ages been the truest and 
bravest of men; and to-day the appeal is to clean- 
souled men who are brave enough to stand with 
their Lord against all the world—men of personal 
knowledge of sins forgiven, who have the courage of 
their convictions, and who honor the Spirit by seek- 
ing his leadership. Such men hold the Bible to be 
the Word of God and Christ to be the Son of God who 
through him revealed himself to the world. 

There are those to-day, as there always have been, 
who, together with their worldly churches, have 
scant use for the Holy Spirit and think it “wild 
enthusiasm”’ to talk of the conversion of souls or 
sonship with God and the witness of God’s in- 
dwelling Spirit. Yet by this same agency God 
designs to redeem the world and make himself 
known to mankind. In all this vast process the 
Spirit-filled and Spirit-led man is God’s hero and 
advance leader. And in all the great world move- 
ments where is there such morale among the soldiery, 
such a cause and such a training camp for heroes, 
as among those who champion the reality of the 
Jesus religion? 


A WORLD TASK THE GOAL 


In keeping with the great foretelling, that “‘when 
the Comforter is come, he will lead into all truth, 
and reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, 
and of judgment,” it has been, in recent years, the 
white man’s burden to carry this truth to the utter- 
most parts of the earth. Such is his sense of duty 


Led ‘of the Spirit: The Way of Safety 395 


and compelling ideal; and nowhere is the leading 
of the Spirit more evident, and no task so fascinating 
as the world-wide uplift of mankind. As Dr. W. L. 
Watkinson so forcefully put it: ‘The bones of the 
English explorers, traders, and soldiers whiten every 
shore; they sleep in gloomy forests, in wild wilder- 
nesses, and beneath solitary seas. This the English 
nation has done not on mere secular grounds, but 
that she might serve dependent peoples and teach 
them how to live.” This is the task of Christian 
civilization. 

Till the Spirit led the way, the world had little 
conception of sin, righteousness, and judgment. The 
individual could lay claim to no rights. The will 
of the ruler was the law; the Kaiser could commit no 
sin. At will he could invade neighboring nations, lay 
waste their country, drive off their herds, and lead 
off the most beautiful women for slaves and wives. 
It fell to the lot of Spirit-led men to establish a 
social and commercial standard in all the world. 
If the Great War did nothing else, it established the 
Tribunal of Humanity before which even kings must 
stand and made sacred the individual rights of men. 

To-day it is the true, Spirit-led men who exalt 
righteousness in the land. For their beacon light 
all the benighted world awaits. To fail of sending 
this light is to miss the world vision and fail of being 
mustered into line in the forward march and miss the 
inspiration of the hour ae the joy of lifting up a 
needy world. 

THE Panne? THOUGHT 

Personality is the basis of all real religion, and for 

this reason it has been set in the open throughout 


396 A Gospel for the New Age 


these pages. No other idea will answer the demands 
of Christianity. While ours is a social religion, 
binding men together the world around, and “team- 
work” is most effective in Christian effort, what is 
meant by “‘herd religion,’ in which the individual 
is submerged and lost to personal responsibility for 
world uplift, finds no advocacy in the régime of the 
Holy Spirit. Such a religion is not real nor dynamic. 

Some men condemn glibly enough a corrupt 
church and a lagging Christianity, little thinking 
that they themselves are particeps criminis and 
should be heart-smitten over a defeat to which they 
have lent their influence. Not being a professed 
Christian or Church member does not exonerate 
anyone. All men are members of the great human 
family and are therefore in honor bound to bear a 
share in the world’s welfare. If one repudiate this 
obligation and refuse to become religious, he is all 
the more reprehensible. If the Church lags, he is 
one of its hinderers. 

How useless to fancy that the Holy Spirit will 
lead unholy men to save and uplift a doubting and 
denying age! Forward-looking men are men of 
faith, of prayer, and a holy trust. They know what 
real religion is, and they burn with a desire to bring 
it to all men. Such men have God with them. 
They, being led of the Spirit, become in far-reaching 
reality “world builders.” They walk in the way of 
religious safety and experience the fulfillment of 
that promise: ‘‘Lo, I am with you alway, even unto 
the end of the world.”’ This is God’s will concerning 
us all, and this is dynamic. 


INDEX 


A 
Addison, Joseph, 218, 364. 
Agassiz, Louis, 27, 103, 377. 
Amiel, 144. 
Aquinas, Thomas, 112. 
Aristotle, 358. 
Arnold, Matthew, 42, 195. 
Arnold, Sir Edwin, 320. 
Augustine, St., 126. 


B 


Bacon, Francis, 193, 306. 
Beet, J. Agar, 372. 
Bergson, Henri, 275. 
Bernhardi, 274, 275, 276. 
Birrell, Augustine, 195. 
Blackstone, 241. 
Bolingbroke, Henry, 218, 384. 
Brewer, Theodore F., 244. 
Brooks, Phillips, 153. 
Browning, Robert, 53, 193, 
Me 
Bryan, William J., 278. 
Burbank, Luther, 264. 
Burke, Edmund, 218. 
Bushnell, Horace, 99, 233, 
235. 
Butler, Joseph, 192, 193. 


C 
Calvin, John, 64, 190. 
Carlyle, Thomas, 48, 190, 
338, 345. 
Carpenter, Boyd, 326. 
“arpenter, Edward, 30. 
Cartwright, Peter, 385. 


Chalmers, Thomas, 200, 261. 

Charlemagne, 91. 

Chrysostom, 243. 

Cicero, 242. 

Clarke, James Freeman, 62, 
244, 

Clarke, W. N., 171. 

Clive, Robert, 218. 

Cook, Joseph, 333. 

Cromwell, Oliver, 91, 104. 


D 


Dale, Robert W., 135, 194. 
Dante, 138. 

Darwin, 208, 212. 

Davie, 27. 

Deems, C. F., 46. 
Drummond, Henry, 207, 249. 


E 


Edison, Thomas A., 92, 377. 

Edman, Irwin, 80, 342. 

Edwards, Jonathan, 192, 201, 
239, 376, 384. 

Ellwood, Charles A., 30. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 22. 

Eucken, Rudolf, 207, 274. 


F 

Fairbairn, A. M., 52, 71. 
Faraday, Michael, 27, 348, 

377. 
Field, Cyrus, 311. 
Fenélon, 243. 
Finney, Charles G., 214, 243, 
Fiske, Jchn, 49, 207, 244. 


(397) 


398 


Fitchett, W. H., 204, 218. 
Fletcher, John, 191. 
Forsyth, Peter, 242, 2338. 
Franklin, Benjamin, 384. 
Froude, James A., 191, 348. 


G 
Gibbon, Thomas, 51, 92. 
Gilbert, John Wesley, 309. 
Gordon, ‘‘ Chinese,” 377. 


Gordon, George A., 321, 338. 


Greeley, Horace, 31. 
Guizot, M., 381. 


H 


Hale, Nathan, 309. 

Hall, Charles G., 300, 335. 

Hall, Robert, 384. 

Hamilton, William, 49. 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 267. 

Haygood, Atticus G., 231. 

Herschel, William, 205. 

Hough, Lynn Harold, 245, 
270. 

Hugo, Victor, 122. 

Hume, David, 218. 

Hurst, John Fletcher, 56. 

Huss, John, 248. 

Huxley, Thomas, 208, 255, 


310. 

I 
Ingersoll, Robert G., 44, 
295, 372. 

J 


Jackson, George, 216. 
Jackson, Stonewall, 390. 
James, Professor, 216. 
Jefferson, Charles, 16, 23. 


A Gospel for the New Age. 


Jefferson, Thomas, 210. 
Jerome, St., 150. 

Johnson, Samuel, 218, 384. 
Jones, J. D., 18. 

Jones, Sam P., 174. 


K 


Kant, Immanuel, 42, 205, 
334. 

Keller, Helen, 245. 

Kelman, 25. 

Kepler, John, 348, 377. 

Knox, John, 243. 


L 
Ladd, G. T., 2138. 
Lambuth, Bishop W. R., 
219, 309. 
Lanier, Sidney, 339. 
Laplace, 205. 
Lapsley, Samuel J., 309. 
Latimer, Hugh, 297. 
Law, William, 247. 
Laws, Robert, 309. 
Le Bon, Gustave, 387. 
Lecky, W. H., 42, 56, 217. 
Lessing, G. E., 31. 
Lindsey, Judge Ben H., 32, 
190. 


Livingstone, David, 307, 
377. 
Lowell, James Russell, 248. 
Luther, Martin, 62, 190, 
248, 382. 
M 


McAuley, Jerry, 306. 
MacDonald, George, 246. 
McDougall, 342. 
Mackay, 309. 


Index 


MacKenzie, Jean Kenyon, 
309. 

McGhee, John, 386. 

McGready, 386. 

Mangus, 192, 193. 

Mansard, Francois, 381. 

Martineau, James, 241. 

Marvin, Enoch, 243. 

Matheson, George, 319. 

Mathews, Shailer, 128, 134, 
286. 

Mill, John Stuart, 42. 

Milton, John, 53. 

Mitchell, W. S., 224, 364. 

Moody, Dwight L., 194. 

Morgan, G. Campbell, 174. 


N 


Napoleon, 14. 

Neesima, Joseph Hardy, 388. 

Nelson, Lord, 102. 

Newton, Isaac, 206, 218, 246, 
377. 

Nietzsche, 208, 272. 

Nordau, Max, 387. 


P 


Paine, Tom, 384. 
Paley, Bishop, 218. 
Pascal, Blaise, 42, 43. 
Peabody, A. P., 330. 
Pericles, 91. 

Philo, 121. 

Pitt, William, 218, 384. 
Plato, 206. 

Pope, Alexander, 112. 


R 
Ramsey, Sir William, 307. 
Raphael, 206. 


399 


Rauschenbusch, 134. 
Richter, Jean Paul, 104. 
Robinson, James Harvey, 208. 
Romanes, G. J., 310. 
Rosebery, Lord, 53. 

Royce, Josiah, 209. 

Russell, Bertrand, 82. 


S 

Sabatier, August, 30. 
Sankey, Ira D., 194. 
Savonarola, 190, 243. 
Schleiermacher, 42. 
Schopenhauer, 208. 
Shakespeare, William, 46, 

206. 
Shelling, 51. 
Sherman, 19. 
Simon Magus, 373. 
Smith, Bishop Coke, 156. 
Smith, George Adam, 194. 
Smith, G. G., 187. 
Smith, Rodney (Gipsy), 306. 
Smucker, 260. 
Smyth, Newman, 139. 
Snowden, 165. 
Spencer, Herbert, 42. 
Stanley, Henry M., 309. 
Stevens, George, 165, 387. 
Stevenson, Robert L., 348. 


yb 


Tennent, Gilbert, 193. 


Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 53. 

Tetzel, John, 382. 

Thackeray, William, 348. 

Tyndall, John, 205, 206, 212, 
351. 


400 A Gospel for the New Age 


V Washington, George, 53, 91, 


Van Dyke, Henry, 118, 153. 384. 
Watkinson, W. L., 395. 


Vanderbilt, Commodore C., Watson, John, 216, 293. 

46. : Webster, Daniel, 260. 
Villari, Pasquale, 190. Wesley, John, 195, 218, 248, 
Voltaire, 51, 372, 384. 384. 

Von Nietzsche, 208, 272. Westcott, B. F., 77. 
Whitefield, George, 192, 193, 
WwW 876, 384. 
Wagner, Charles, 14, 224. Wilson, Woodrow, 53, 91. 


Warburton, 193, 194. Wordsworth, William, 53. 





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